The Difference Between Reading and Writing

Writing is a process that’s entirely totalitarian. A writer is a tyrant, a dictator. He has complete power over every comma, every sentence, every character. When I’m writing, I’m the boss — I’m in charge. When the book is published, the political nature of it changes completely. People can read my books in whatever way they want to. I don’t want any control over the process of reading, it’s democratic: and furthermore, between the reader and the book there opens up a space of complete freedom, which is also private. In a democracy, we have a private voting booth. It’s secret. So the difference between reading and writing is the difference between democracy and tyranny. 

PHILIP PULLMAN

Being Open

It’s that being open—not scratching for it, not digging for it, not constructing something but being open to the situation and trusting that what you don’t know will be available to you. It is bigger than your overt consciousness or your intelligence or even your gifts; it is out there somewhere and you have to let it in.

TONI MORRISON

One Word After Another

One word after another. That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

NEIL GAIMAN

Great Art Is Propaganda

It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda, whether it be the Sistine Chapel or La Gioconda, Madame Bovary or War and Peace. The moment the novelist begins to show how society affected the lives of his characters, how they were formed and shaped by the sprawling inchoate world in which they lived, he is writing a novel of social criticism whether he calls it that or not.

ANN PETRY

Be Concise

Be concise; try expressing your thoughts with the least possible number of words, avoiding long sentences—or sentences interrupted by incidental phrases that always confuse the casual reader—in order to avoid contributing to the general pollution of information, which is surely (particularly when it is uselessly ripe with unnecessary explanations, or at least non indispensable specifications) one of the tragedies of our media-dominated time.

UMBERTO ECO

Feel It

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

Sentence by Sentence

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

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

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

Promiscuity

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