Count the Chairs

If you’re thinking of writing a short story with three scenes, it’s not the worst idea to scratch out a sketch of the town the story happens in, the living room where people sit and talk, the view from the windows, the traffic outside. All that is part of the story, and the more deeply you take charge of it, the more easily you keep the reader enchanted. Really bad writers don’t care about this stuff. They’re always having daring adventurers trying to get into “impregnable castles,” but then they figure the hell with it and cut to the next scene, where the hero is inside the castle. We, as “serious” artists, shouldn’t do that. If we’re going to have a dinner party for ten people, we’d better provide a dining room with ten chairs. If there are only eight chairs, there had better be two people who don’t have a place to sit down, or who don’t get invited.

CAROLYN SEE

The Reader Comes First

Most of the fact writing has become selfish writing. The writers don't think about the reader but about themselves. They're all trying to show their wonderful minds and their unique unhappinesses and their fascinating adjustments and so on. Writing is for the reader. [The reader] always comes first.

MAEVE BRENNAN

There Is No Secret Code

The whole “Can I call myself a writer?” question I found so odd, as if it’s some sort of identity that is separate from the actual act of writing. It’s very, very strange to me. There is no secret password to being a writer. There is no secret code. You just do it. People would like to imagine that the work involved is not just the writing itself. There’s serious work in writing. It’s not something other than that, really.

LYNNE TILLMAN

Look for Hot-Spots

I finish them all. This comes out of some kind of professional pride. I finish even if I know or strongly suspect a story is crap. You’ve got to get it done and see what you’ve got. Put it in a drawer for a few weeks—this cliché is true—and then take it out again, rub your hand over the material and look for the hot-spots. By a hot-spot I mean merely the good stuff, the true stuff. Actually, it’s what you tend to wriggle away from on the page. The stuff that makes you feel uncomfortable or shameful in some way. The stuff that embarrasses you, that isn’t trying to sound like, you know, a piece of cool prose. The stuff that comes from deep within you and mortifies you. These are the hot-spots. They make a story come alive.

KEVIN BARRY

Do Whatever You Need to Do

I had a wonderful teacher, Irwin Blacker, and he was feared by everyone at the school because he took a very interesting position. He gave you the screenplay form, which I hated so much, and if you made one mistake on the form, you flunked the class. His attitude was that the least you can learn is the form. “I can’t grade you on the content. I can’t tell you whether this is a better story for you to write than that, you know? And I can’t teach you how to write the content, but I can certainly demand that you do it in the proper form.” He never talked about character arcs or anything like that; he simply talked about telling a good yarn, telling a good story. He said, “Do whatever you need to do. Be as radical and as outrageous as you can be. Take any kind of approach you want to take. Feel free to flash back, feel free to flash forward, feel free to flash back in the middle of a flashback. Feel free to use narration, all the tools are there for you to use.”

JOHN MILIUS

Obituary Writing

The nature of obituary writing, it is a very intimate act. At the beginning of a day you are meeting a stranger whose work you may not know and whom you may not have heard of when your editor comes over with a sheaf of clips from the morgue and an assignment. You really have to take in through inhalation every facet of this stranger’s life. By the time deadline rolls around and you have spent four or five hours in intense communion with this person, if you are lucky and the planets are in the right alignment, you can make an exhalation onto the page, which is not only swift and accurate but also has some of those resonant phrases.

MARGALIT FOX

Collage Technique

In 1974, I was assigned by The New York Times Magazine to write about the kidnaping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army in Berkeley, California. I spent weeks poking around the Bay Area, but when the deadline approached, Patty was still at large and had joined her kidnapers in robbing the Hibernia bank, wielding a sawed-off M-1 carbine. No one knew what had actually happened, the story was still developing, and I told Didion I was struggling with how the hell to structure it. She advised me to write scenes on index cards—interviews I’d done and events I’d witnessed. “Then spread them on the floor and see how you can fit them together, with space breaks in between. Like arranging a patchwork quilt.” She’d done this with numerous pieces, including the iconic essay, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” Doubtful at first, I tried it and found it worked.

SARA DAVIDSON

Kick the Dog

Chayefsky used to say, “There are two kinds of scenes: the Pet the Dog scene and the Kick the Dog scene. The studio always wants a Pet the Dog scene so everybody can tell who the hero is.” Bette Davis made a great career kicking the dog, as did Bogart, as did Cagney (how about White Heat—is that a great performance or not?). I’m sure the audience identified with Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs as much as with Jodie Foster. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been the roar of laughter that greeted the wonderful line “I’m having an old friend for dinner.”

SIDNEY LUMET

The Reader Doesn't Exist

I don’t think much about the reader. Ways of reading are adversaries—those theoretical ways. As far as writing something is concerned, the reader really doesn’t exist. The writer’s business is somehow to create in the work something which will stand on its own and make its own demands; and if the writer is good, he discovers what those demands are, and he meets them, and creates this thing which readers can then do what they like with. Gertrude Stein said, “I write for myself and strangers,” and then eventually she said that she wrote only for herself. I think she should have taken one further step. You don’t write for anybody. People who send you bills do that. People who want to sell you things so they can send you bills do that. People who want to tell you things so they can sell you things so they can send you bills do that. You are advancing an art—the art. That is what you are trying to do.

WILLIAM H. GASS

Almost Anything Can Happen

A novel is a long and complex creation. The parts bear a mysterious and clouded relation to the whole. The pages turn, one after another, and it is a distinguishing aspect of the novel that, around the next corner, almost anything can happen. We hardly know which to treasure most: expectation confounded or satisfied. A new chapter is a psychological shift and the interesting dislocations afforded by a flashback make great demands on the imagination. In the older works we were often grateful for the relief, the relaxation, as if for a short nap, brought to us by a sudden shift to the sub-plot.

ELIZABETH HARDWICK