An essay is not simpler, though it may seem so. An essay is essentially an argument. The writer’s point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear. The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince them of something. In a novel or a play you’re trying to show them something. The risks, in any case, are exactly the same.
JAMES BALDWIN
One way to use coincidence and make it work is to have nothing turn on it. Coincidences feel illegitimate when they solve problems. If the story doesn’t benefit from the coincidence, it’s simply pretty and suggestive. Another way to make a coincidence work is to begin a story with it. Make it the reason there’s a story to tell in the first place. A third is to establish that the community in which your story takes place is one in which coincidence is part of the landscape. People in my town, New Haven, Connecticut, revel in coincidence, and we claim it happens here all the time: you know everyone in more than one way. Maybe this is true in all cities of a certain size—small enough that the barista will turn out to be your office mate’s daughter; large enough that you’ll be surprised.
ALICE MATTISON
Life is formless—its interconnections are cancelled by lapses of time, by events occurring in separate places, by the hiatus of memory. We live in the world made by man and the past. Art suggests or makes the interconnection palpable. Form is the tension of these interconnections: man with man, man with the past and present environment. The drama at its best is a mass experience of this tension.
ARTHUR MILLER
Reviews have nothing to do with the real life of literature, which happens in an unpredictable elsewhere, a place beyond commodity that no publicity campaign can chart a path to: it happens when a 14-year-old kid in Kentucky, say, pulls Giovanni’s Room down from a library shelf, as I did, having no idea that it would speak to me more intimately than anything had ever spoken to me before, that it would radically change my sense of myself and of my relationship to dignity, that in some quite genuine way it would save my life. That intimate communication between writer and reader, that miracle of affective translation across distance and time, is the real life of literature; that’s what matters; that’s why we endure Roth’s failure and humiliation to perform the extraordinary act of faith that is fixing our voices on the page. What a trial it is, what an intermittent joy, what an extraordinary privilege.
GARTH GREENWELL
I tell my students what I tell myself, write every day, even if it’s only a few lines, an image, a funny rhyme, a snatch of overheard conversation. All this is like chopped vegetables for the soup pot or witches cauldron of poems. And I tell them to read, read, read, and imitate the poems they love. I have tried to respond to every poem I’ve ever loved and it has served me well. Poetry is like church to me, and when I read a good poem it’s like the preacher calling out to the congregation, asking for a Hail Mary or a Hallelujah or Amen!
DORIANNE LAUX
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.
ANN PATCHETT
Make up a story.... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
TONI MORRISON
I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial. To write a novel, you must first understand at a physical level how one is put together… . It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on—great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading. Absorb as many stories as you physically can. Introduce yourself to lots of great writing. To lots of mediocre writing too. This is your most important task.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Your characters…are like children. You give birth to these children but you have to send them into the world and then they have to live their own lives. Some people will hate the characters, some people will love them, just like in real life. I like to imagine my characters going out into the world to interact with the readers by themselves. And I’m completely free from that. I just let go.
YIYUN LI
In a short foreword to his father’s novel, Anthony Puzo points out that in an early version of the screenplay, Coppola refers to Clemenza browning meat in a skillet. Mario Puzo scribbled on the draft, “Gangsters don’t brown. Gangsters fry.” Now, if you compare the novel to the screenplay, you discover something else. There’s no dialogue in that moment in the book. Clemenza is cooking spaghetti for his crew in the Corleone kitchen. In the screenplay, he invites Michael to learn how to cook for 20 men, and then proceeds to do a running commentary on his actions, right down to “frying” meatballs. So the scene becomes much more vivid and funny in the movie because of what he says—but both creators had a hand in that.
MALCOLM JONES
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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