Why Short Stories?

Why short stories? I really don’t know. Maybe it’s at least partly because I’m very slow—I’m a shockingly slow reader, I write extremely slowly, I walk slowly, I think slowly. Much of my reading when I was young was short fiction, because it takes me about as long to read a story as it takes most people to read a novel, and I suppose I developed a taste for the sort of mystery to which concision is especially conducive, and for the athleticism that lacunae ask of the reader.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

Postpartum Blues

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know, how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years’ imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever.

CHARLES DICKENS

Remove Ketcham Completely

If the writer has decided to change the name of his protagonist from Ketcham to McTavish, Ketcham should not keep bobbing up in the last five pages. A good way to eliminate this confusion is to read the piece over before sending it out, and remove Ketcham completely. He is a nuisance.
JAMES THURBER

A Piece of Writing Is Either Good Or Not

I don’t write very much nonfiction, and, to be honest, when I do I have the sense that I’m tricking somebody because I don’t entirely understand the distinction. A piece of writing is either good or not. The good is true, the not good is false. Everything a person writes should be infused with her opinions, thoughts, feelings, moods, dreams. Basically, the goal is to have a really good infusion mechanism worked out.

YELENA AKHTIORSKAYA

Writing Is an Addiction

Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.

JOHN UPDIKE

Writers Groups

Writers groups can be good and they can be bad. Depends on the people in them, and what they’re in them for. On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing. If you find your writers group stopping you from writing, then drop it.

NEIL GAIMAN

Writing In a Diary Is a Strange Experience

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing.

ANNE FRANK

Get the Reader Into the Story

As I wrote A Wild Sheep Chase, I came to feel strongly that a story, a monogatari, is not something you create. It is something that you pull out of yourself. The story is already there, inside you. You can’t make it, you can only bring it out. This is true for me, at least: it is the story’s spontaneity. For me, a story is a vehicle that takes the reader somewhere. Whatever information you may try to convey, whatever you may try to open the reader’s emotions to, the first thing you have to do is get that reader into the vehicle. And the vehicle–the story–the monogatari–must have the power to make people believe. These above all are the conditions that a story must fulfill.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

We Can't Put the Magic In

We, and I think I’m speaking for many writers, don’t know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is to write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don’t think that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn’t work that way. When the magic comes, it’s a gift.

MADELEINE L’ENGLE

See How Dull You Can Be

I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: “See how bad a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!” And of course no one can. Try this yourself. It is a relief and you see then how you are not dull at all. It is just as guilty people who are always trying to be so good, should try to be very bad and resolve to stick to it. They would find then how natural it comes to them to be good and would not strain after it, which makes them hypocrites, though in a nice way.

BRENDA UELAND