The Great Thing About Writing

The great thing about writing is that it can be produced in sub-optimal—even atrocious—conditions. And so many of the most interesting books are. It’s the one art form that isn’t beholden to power or money. Which is perhaps why so much of what we celebrate in writing comes from the edges—geographically, politically, socially, economically. What a writer needs above all is a mad courage to overcome the fear of failure we all have, which is also, unfortunately, often also the most destructive vanity. The reader wins in this, and mostly the writer gains little or loses most things or even everything. Their grail is that they will make something beautiful and very occasionally enduring, and, of course, they almost never get there. But how wonderful that they keep trying.

RICHARD FLANAGAN

How to Steal a Quote

It’s a matter of principle to attribute the source when using someone else’s words. But what happens when you remember the words or phrase but can’t remember who said it? There was a time when I searched the internet for the person who’d written the phrase I wanted to use, describing someone’s eyes, but came up empty. [Joan] Didion suggested a work-around, circling her finger in the air as she spoke. “You could write, ‘He had eyes that someone once described as…’ and use the quote.”

SARA DAVIDSON

Writing Habits

I’m a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. I see it happen all the time. Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn’t mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don’t think any of that was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don’t sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won’t be sitting there.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR

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