Your Ideal Reader

Who’s your ideal reader? Don’t imagine someone who loves your work and gets what you’re trying to do. Imagine the most impatient person you know, the one whose attention is hard to hold onto, the one who says spit it out or get to the point when you’re trying to tell an anecdote. That’s your ideal reader. If you can successfully engage someone like that, you’re probably not cutting yourself any slack in the clarity department, and you’re definitely not cutting yourself any slack in the economy department.

PATRICK RYAN

Write for Yourself

I had been writing for fifteen years and getting nowhere. Everything I had written was derivative, influenced by others. Then finally I decided to please myself. It was a great gamble, but finally I cut the umbilical cord, and in severing it I became an entity. I became myself.

HENRY MILLER

Central Truth

There is a kind of central truth and if you get the central truth, and the motion of people, then the rest is implied. Henry James talks about this in The Art of Fiction. He writes about a woman writer he knew who ran up the stairs of a little French house in Paris, and on her way up she passed a room with a door open and inside there was a meeting going on of French Huguenots—this was in the nineteenth century—and they were smoking cigarettes and talking. She was only there for half a minute; she paused and then she went on. Two or three years later she wrote a book about the Huguenots, and everything in it, as Henry James said, was absolutely true. She just went from that one moment. Now, I was very careful not to tell my students to only write about what you know, because I couldn’t define what they knew. That’s where the question really begins. How to define what you know. And what she knew and sensed in that second was everything.

PAULA FOX

Screenwriting 101

[The Godfather] was the first time I’d ever written a screenplay, so I didn’t know what I was doing…and it came out right. After I had won two Academy Awards for the first two “Godfathers,” I went out and bought a book on screenwriting because it was sort of off the top of my head and I figured I'd better learn what it’s about. In the first chapter the book said, “study Godfather I, it’s the model of a screenplay.” So I was stuck with the book.

MARIO PUZO

Postpartum Blues

I am never happy with any manuscript I have ever turned in. What counts for me is if I’m not mortified by what gets published. Even in the final book, there will be errors, and it just kills me that they’ll be there until the reprint; hopefully I’m alive when that happens. On the other hand, if I kept a book until I thought it was perfect, it would never be published.

AMY TAN

The Character Determines the Prose

The character on the page determines the prose—its music, its rhythms, the range and limit of its vocabulary—yet, at the outset at least, I determine the character. It usually happens that the fictitious character, once released, acquires a life and will of his or her own, so the prose, too, acquires its own inexplicable fluidity. This is one of the reasons I write: to “hear” a voice not quite my own, yet summoned forth by way of my own.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Read Everything

It’s important to read new books: to know what your contemporaries are writing, to keep your finger on the pulse of a literary culture. But I worry, with many of the MFA students I meet, that writing being done in America right now is almost all they read. I think current American writing is vibrant and exciting; but any time you draw most of your reading from a single country, a single language, a single decade, you’re drawing from a very shallow well. Read everything; seek the deepest and most varied wells. The writer Yiyun Li has a rule: for every book she reads by a living writer, she reads at least one book by a dead writer. This is an excellent rule. Read in other languages. Every significant period of innovation in English-language literature has happened because of the collision of languages and traditions.

GARTH GREENWELL

The Reader Is the Writer's Enemy

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader…. The reader is, in fact, the writer’s only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. . . . It is, of course, the writer’s job to reach out and grab this reader: If he is a reader who cannot endure a love story, it is the writer’s job, no more and no less, to make him read a love story and like it. Using any device that might possibly work, the writer has to snare the reader’s attention and keep it.

SHIRLEY JACKSON

Stop Screwing Around

Listen, Stephen King used to write in the washroom of his trailer after his kids went to sleep. Harlan Ellison wrote in the stall of a bathroom of his barracks during boot camp. Elmore Leonard got up at 5 AM every morning to write before work. Every time my alarm goes off at 5 AM and I don’t want to get up, or I would rather sit down after work and play a videogame, I think about those guys. Take care of your family. They need you and love you. Make time for them. Then stop screwing around and finish your damn book. 

BERNARD SCHAFFER

Acquire a Cat

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work, I explained, the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp. The light from a lamp, I explained, gives a cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.

MURIEL SPARK