I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story.
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
The only thing I’ve got better at as the years have gone by is I’ve grown more resigned to the fact that it comes hard. You realize that hesitation and frustration and waiting are part of the process, and you don’t panic. I get a lot better at not panicking. I get up every morning early if it’s a writing day and I will do nothing else but write that day. But the secret is not to panic if it doesn’t come.
CLIVE JAMES
I think the arts exist because they are useful — essential to our species. I think it’s part of being human, to make art and need art. For the pleasure of it, and for whatever knowledge we get out of it. Reading each other helps us imagine each other. And empathy seems like something we are in great need of, as a species, in order to survive.
SHARON OLDS
Take your time but don’t dawdle. You have to get comfortable with experimenting and getting it wrong and also staring at the computer screen with nothing to type. All this discomfort and doubt and frustration in the beginning is just what you have to go through to get to the place where something begins to take shape. Sometimes this period can last a long time. Sometimes not. Either way, it’s just as necessary as the days where you feel like you’re transcribing something that already exists and your fingers can’t move fast enough to put down the words that flow so easily (these days are fun and worth waiting for).
BILL CLEGG
I try to see as much as possible—in microscopic detail. I have an exercise that helps me with this, using old family photographs. I’ll blow an image up as much as I can, and work through it pixel by pixel. This isn’t the way we typically look at pictures—where we take in the whole gestalt, eyes focusing mostly on the central image. I’ll start at, say, a corner, looking at every detail. And the strangest things happen: you end up noticing things you never would have noticed. Sometimes, I’ve discovered crucial, overlooked details that are important to my family’s story. This process is a metaphor for the way I work—it’s the same process of looking closely, looking carefully, looking in the unexpected places, and being receptive to what you find there.
AMY TAN
When people feel depressed or anxious, what often troubles them is time. If you cannot see tomorrow, a minute goes so slowly, the clock doesn’t move, and that’s how I feel when I’m not doing well. So, I read writers’ letters and journals — you’re looking at a lifetime in 600 pages. For instance, Katherine Mansfield died young but in her journal it was a lifetime. She had to live every day. Every day was still pain and struggle and poverty. Days are repetitive. Reading other people’s letters and journals makes me a little more patient with life.
YIYUN LI
We are a people who are massaged by fictions; we grow up in a sea of narratives and myths, the perpetual invention of stories.… Your mother would tell you stories to illustrate a hundred different points, lessons, morals she wanted to get across to you. Or you’d tell stories to one another as a way of making the moonlight more intoxicating, more beautiful.
BEN OKRI
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
So much of it is luck. Dumb fucking luck. There is so much talent out there—in every area—and it can't get a set of eyes [to see it] or ears to hear it because it hasn't gotten into a magical circle yet. The magical circle of the right plays with the right directors with the right agents with the right reviews. No one escapes this; no one ever did. What I would like to do—and what we should all do, including you with your writing and recounting—is to persuade those with dreams and talent to keep at it, despite the odds and despite the fact that the luck hasn't noticed them yet. You have to believe that it will, and what you and I have to do is make some noise and wave some flags so that luck looks over and finally notices the mendicant that has kept up the work.
ARTHUR PENN
Every writer approaches writing in a different way, and while some of those ways may be more straightforward than others, very few can be dismissed as categorically wrong. There are people who write in order to find out where the story goes. They never talk about what they’re working on. They say that if they knew the ending of the book, there would be no point in writing it, that the story would then be dead to them. And they’re right. There are also people, and I am one of them, who map out everything in advance. (John Irving, for example, can’t start writing his books until he thinks up the last sentence.) And we are also right. There are a couple of habits I have acquired through years of trial and error that I would recommend emulating, but either you will or you won’t.
ANN PATCHETT
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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