Fiction writers who toss up their arms helplessly because their characters “take over” — powerful rascals, what is a god to do? — refer, I think, to…structural mysteries that seize any serious work, whether or not it possesses fifth-column characters who wreak havoc from within. Sometimes part of a book simply gets up and walks away. The writer cannot force it back into place. It wanders off to die.
ANNIE DILLARD
Writer’s block for me is a question I haven’t solved yet—Why is Martin doing this? What happens after they meet? What the hell is going on in this scene? It’s a question I haven’t answered yet, but I trust that in two hours, two days, or two months I will eventually answer it. Maybe I have to keep writing and come back to that part of the story later. Maybe I have to do some more research. Maybe it’ll come to me in the shower. But eventually I’ll figure it out.
COLSON WHITEHEAD
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
CHERYL STRAYED
It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we “fail” to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Novels are like marriages. You have to get into the mood to write them — not because of what writing them is going to be like, but because it's so sad to end them. When I finished my first book, I really felt like I'd fallen in love with my main character and that she'd died. You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish, then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff. Characters in stories are different. They come alive in the corners of your eyes. You don't have to live with them.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
But in the sitting there, there is a sort of bowl or space for the imagination. William Maxwell wrote this wonderful collection of fairy tales—that’s where the bowl image comes from. He was like, I try to be as open and receptive as I can with my brain like a bowl, or my head like a bowl. I’m ready to receive the ideas. And I suppose I’m just so invested in the non-scarcity model, which is like, if you are showing up, stuff will come up. We’re full of material, all of us
AIMEE BENDER
I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
I'm trying to help us remember that we invent our own beauty and our own paths and our own crooked, weird ways of doing things, but that they're not nothing and they matter, too. We're the half of culture that doesn't take the paths that are sitting right in front of us. Our song may be a little off-key, but it's a kind of beauty, too.
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH
For many writers, research is a big yawn. The past is a foreign country, and who cares how they do things differently there? Research is reading disintegrating papers in dusty libraries; sifting through shoe boxes in ancient attics; interviewing people who don’t know when to stop talking. But for biographers, research is thrilling. Reconstructing history is delicious. Research is where the story comes from; it’s the bits and pieces of the past we are trying to bring to life.
SUSAN CHEEVER
I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations. They generally produce their worst work when they do that. The other thing I would say is that if you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being. Go a little out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.
DAVID BOWIE
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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