Writers and actors have some creative ground in common, and so when you're writing a scene and hoping to convey a mood it's not the worst idea to try to put that mood into your headspace -- feel it, if only a little. I'm not saying you have to kill a kitten or punch your mother to feel something -- I just mean, stir up the memory of certain emotions if not the emotion itself. Same way an actor might think about a sad moment to conjure tears on-camera.
CHUCK WENDIG
My work accrues sentence by sentence. After an initial phase of sitting patiently, not so patiently, struggling to locate them, to pin them down, they begin arriving, fully formed in my brain. I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom. By myself, I know, though the source feels independent, recondite, especially at the start. The light will be turned on, a sentence or two will be hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper, carried upstairs to the manuscript in the morning. I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
AUDRE LORDE
Everyone wants to collaborate with the writer. “They” want to tell us how to make our work better, brighter, sharper, funnier, sadder, longer, shorter, less subtle, more subtle, more socko, more boffo, sicko, psycho; improvements they’re all qualified to make because of their various titles and because, unlike the writer, they’re not too close to our work. (As though feeling or being too close to your endeavors is some sort of sin. “Someone else is going to finish that ceiling for you, Mr. Michelangelo. The Pope feels you’ve gotten too close to your work.”)
LARRY GELBART
It’s critical for me to have at least two projects going on at once so I can flip between them when I get bored or need a break. Inevitably, the one that I’m not supposed to be working on will be more appealing to me. For years, I wrote a novel that didn’t move me because I’d had a tiny bit of interest from an editor. It actually turned out to be a good thing because it was this big, dumb project I could run around on. It was there being boring in the background and it made sneaking away with short stories or other novel ideas very exciting. I know some people follow one thing through at a time, but I definitely think promiscuity is an important part of my process. My different projects “talk” to each other and inform my perspective.
KIMBERLY KING PARSONS
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
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
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
“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
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
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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