No Big Ideas

What I care about is individuals enmeshed in some nexus of particulars. Philosophical generalization is completely alien to me—some other writer’s work. I’m a philosophical illiterate. All my brainpower has to do with specificity, life’s proliferating details. Wouldn’t know what to do with a general idea if it were hand-delivered. Would try to catch the FedEx man before he left the driveway. “Wrong address, pal! Big ideas? No, thanks!”

PHILIP ROTH

You Don't Work On a Voice

You don’t work on a voice. The sentence finds a way to speak itself. This sounds so Delphic. It’s a hard thing to discuss, a voice. I think I am fascinated by syntax and always felt its power, and the poems that moved me most greatly were not the most verbally opulent. They were the poets like Blake and Milton, whose syntax was astonishing, the way emphasis would be deployed.

LOUISE GLÜCK

Fiction Can Do Anything

Writers aren’t obliged to be compassionate or insightful or intelligent or decent human beings in their writing in any way; writers are perfectly free, in their writing, to be scum. That’s one of the great powers of the medium—its unfettered latitude, its unruliness. A piece of fiction can do anything a particular writer wants and can get it to do. Of course, most fiction is inevitably trivial, banal, worthless, boring, or idiotic, and some is evil. But none of it’s going to be much good if all of it has to be worthwhile.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

Voice in Fiction

I think voice is the music of the story's intelligence, that the voice of a novel, the voice of a story, is not the speaking voice of Frank Bascombe but it is something a good bit more complex. It is how a novel sounds when it is doing its most important business on you, when it is, as novels do, as poems do. Novels lean on us. They are artifice. They are rhetorical. They are trying to effect us and change us. And that's what I hear, what I understand, when I use the word “voice.”

RICHARD FORD

Slow Writing

Slow writing – like long exposure photography – can bring about a sense of saturation in the material, where the time taken in the making is experienced as present in the outcome. Dwelling takes time. It is not an end-gaining activity in which a acquires b, but a transformative and relational one in which a is changed – quite probably into something quite unanticipated. It involves a process of passive attention: waiting, without necessarily knowing what for – a quality that Ben Quash, in his book of that title, names as abiding.

ELIZABETH COOK

The Shopping List Technique

Simply this: you sit down and make a list of the ten things that have to happen in your novel—the character actions or physical events without which your story simply cannot occur. Then, when you’re sure you’ve got pretty much the ten major “event beats” or character issues nailed down, you break each of those ten things into its own section and list the ten things that have to happen surrounding that event or supporting that character action. You take your time over this work, because this is the skeleton of the body of your work to come—the physical / emotional / action structure on which you’re going to build your novel.

DIANE DUANE

Weather

Fuck weather. Too many writers go straight to describing the weather. I think it comes from that old saw, “It was a dark and stormy night,” except everyone seems to forget that it comes from a laughably bad book. Describe the weather only if it matters. If a storm has physical effects on the plot, describe it. A miserably cold day might cause a car accident (ice) or lost visibility (blizzard). If the weather matters, tell us. Pro-tip: it usually doesn't matter.

CHUCK WENDIG

Start with Your Eyes Open

Maybe…start your story with your notebook closed, and tap out a few descriptions without consulting it. Then you can open the notebook and confirm the details with your notes. Or — my favorite technique — tell the story out loud to a friend and listen to what naturally bubbles up in the telling. If you’re a writer, you ought to be a good storyteller, with instincts for what makes a listener perk up. Pay attention to what you tell your listener, and you’ll be able to translate that to the page. This all assumes one essential behavior: Namely, that you pay very close attention when you’re collecting information for a story. Worry less about your notes and more about absorbing the experience — really absorbing it, so you know it deeply. The art of noticing is the bedrock; the craft is taking what you’ve noticed and arranging it well on the page. Start with your eyes open, and you’re more than halfway there.

SUSAN ORLEAN

Shorth Is Better Than Length

It has often been said
there’s so much to be read,
you never can cram
all those words in your head.

So the writer who breeds
more words than he needs
is making a chore
for the reader who reads.

That's why my belief is
the briefer the brief is,
the greater the sigh
of the reader's relief is.

And that's why your books
have such power and strength.
You publish with shorth!
(Shorth is better than length.)

DR. SEUSS

Keep the Channel Open

One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers – you can find it in the choreographer Martha Graham’s biography. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

ZADIE SMITH