Take Public Transportation Whenever Possible

I do a lot of writing and note-taking on trips: in airports, on airplanes, on trains. I recommend taking public transportation whenever possible. There are many good reasons to do this (one’s carbon footprint, safety, productive use of time, support of public transportation, etc.), but for a writer, here are two in particular: 1) you will write a good deal more waiting for a bus or sitting on a train than you will driving a car, or as a passenger in a car; and (2) you will be thrown in with strangers—people not of your choosing. Although I pass strangers when I’m walking on a city street, it is only while traveling on public transportation that I sit thigh to thigh with them on a subway, stare at the back of their heads waiting in line, and overhear sometimes extended conversations. It takes me out of my own limited, chosen world. Sometimes I have good, enlightening conversations with them.

LYDIA DAVIS

Hope

I think whether you’re talking about art or politics or just getting up in the morning and trying to live your life, it’s useful to be able to seek out that joy where you can find it and operate on the basis of hope rather than despair. We all have different ways of coping, but I think that the sense of optimism that I have relied on is generally the result of appreciating other people, first and foremost, my own children and my family and my friends. But also the voices that I hear through books and that you hear through song and that tell you you’re not alone.

BARACK OBAMA

Ten-Dollar Words

The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away. When I’m writing it, I’m just as proud as a goddam lion. I use the oldest words in the English language. People think I’m an ignorant bastard who doesn’t know the ten-dollar words. I know the ten-dollar words. There are older and better words which if you arrange them in the proper combination you make it stick. Remember, anybody who pulls his erudition or education on you hasn’t any.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Art's Otherness

“Is the writer much more than a sophisticated parrot?” Gustave Flaubert wondered. Most artists know this feeling—that we’re being led by something outside ourselves. We all choose our styles, our materials, modes, means, tools, and so on, but the work we create isn’t entirely a matter of conscious choice. I never quite know what I’m going to write until I write it—and then I’m not sure where it came from. This is art’s otherness. It’s so powerful that you might sometimes wonder if art is using us to reproduce itself—if art might be a self-replicating cosmic force (or a fungus?) that has colonized us into symbiotic service. This can be thrilling. It can also be unsettling. “It’s like a ghost is writing,” Bob Dylan said, “except the ghost picked me to write the song.” Don’t let this creep you out. Instead, learn to trust it.

JERRY SALTZ

Stay Present

The consensus was obvious: Stay present. Stay with what’s in front of you. Don’t get ahead of yourself, don’t worry about the middle and the ending, just stick with the page you’re on. Of all the writers, the hundreds of Sylvia Plath and Patti Smith and Agatha Christie quotes, Jane Smiley, author of fourteen books and the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, explained it most clearly. “Writing,” she said, “is only one word at a time. It’s not a whole bunch of things happening at once. Various things can present themselves, but when you face the page, it’s a couple of words, and then a couple more words, and, if you’re lucky, a sentence or a paragraph.”

LAUREN MARTIN

It's Up to the Reader to Be Moral

I enjoy books that don’t care if I think they should serve a moral function. Personally, I believe it’s more important that books be laboratories and experiments and it’s up to the reader to be moral. I trust my readers to know that, at times, I’m going to write wickedly and in a messed-up way, about messed-up characters who may behave in an unreliable or suspect manner.

JEFF VANDERMEER

See What Works

I so wish I could plan. Or have a plot in advance. I write in a meandering, searching sort of way without ever quite knowing where the story will end up but I do think my subconscious is doing most of the work, filtering, editing, seeing where the story is going. I do write and rewrite a lot. I print out what I have, read it and edit it on the page. I see what works, what doesn’t, cut, write, add, edit. I think that a lifetime of reading books is the preparation I most value.

JANICE Y.K. LEE

Get to the Point

A wise editor once observed that the easiest decision a reader can make is to stop reading. This means that every sentence has to count in grabbing the reader’s attention, starting with the first. Get to the point: Why does your topic matter? Why should it matter today? And why should the reader care what you, of all people, have to say about it?

BRET STEPHENS

Don’t Write What You Know

I may be wrong about this, but it seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play. When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.

TONI MORRISON

Stories Communicate Feelings

Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings. That they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. There are large glamorous industries around stories; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?

KAZUO ISHIGURO