Work, You Big Baby!

Every artist and writer I know claims to work in their sleep. I do all the time. Jasper Johns famously said, “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.” Just think: You might have been given a whole career in your dreams and not heeded it! It doesn’t matter how scared you are; everyone is scared. Work, you big baby! Work is the only thing that banishes the curse of fear.

JERRY SALTZ

First Readers

I think writers need tolerant people around them. They’re prickly and strange and needy, yet they demand to be left alone. First readers need to be aware of what they’re being asked; it’s mostly for moral support, but any evidence of close reading and real appreciation is welcome to the wretch who feels she’s walking in the dark—it’s as if someone has switched on a light and said, “This way.”

HILARY MANTEL

Action Is Hope

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

RAY BRADBURY

Flow

Do you know the writer Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? He’s a Hungarian psychologist who writes about the state of flow. If you’re in a creative state, then essentially things sort of coagulate and you enter a state of hyper­consciousness—you can write for an hour or so, but it only seems like a few minutes because you’re so concentrated on it. I’ve experienced that a lot, which doesn’t mean there’s no frustration, but I don’t really remember the frustration very well. I remember more when the writing comes together. And I’m willing to seek out that coming together. If I get frustrated, I’ll go eat something, I’ll go open another Diet Coke, I’ll go to the barn, I’ll distract myself, and then the parts in my brain that were working click and I get an idea. I read an article about how to learn to play a musical instrument. You practice, practice, practice on Friday, then you walk away. And then when you sit down on Saturday, you’re better. Not only because of all the practice, but also because of the walking away. I’m a firm believer in walking away. 

JANE SMILEY

Creative Procrastination

I think procrastination can be a really helpful creative tool. So when I procrastinate, I try to do it with intention. I'm like, “For the next hour and a half, I'm going to procrastinate.” I think my writing tends to be stronger after that because I'm giving myself the time and the space to ideate and create. When I procrastinate, it’s a lot of going on social media — I love a good meme, so [I’ll look at] Saint Hoax, for example — maybe binge-watching some show or spending time watching funny dog videos on YouTube.

AMANDA GORMAN

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