Finding Helpful Readers

The success of an MFA program isn’t measured in how many poems you publish or whether you find an agent, or even in how many pages you manage to write; it’s in the friendships you form, and in the number of helpful readers you find. A great workshop, I tell my own students, is one in which you find one or two useful readers, and one or two writers whose work excites you. Hold these people close; don’t lose touch; do the work of maintaining those friendships. Read their poems and stories and essays, honestly and generously; celebrate their successes; help them see disappointments, which are inevitable, in the proper scale.

GARTH GREENWELL

Adaptations

I’ve always loved the movies and I don’t understand writers who feel upset because “they’ve changed my book.” Of course they have. Film is a visual medium. Books are closer to the oral tradition, where you still hear the voice and if it’s done right, the voice readers hear is going to be theirs, not the writer’s. All you should worry about is whether an adaptation is a good work on its own. Forbidden Planet is a brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And it’s fun.

RACHEL INGALLS

Good Writing

I’ve tried to figure out what good writing is. I know it when I read it in other people’s work or my own. The closest I’ve come is that there’s a rhythm to the writing, in the sentence and the paragraph. When the rhythm’s off, it’s hard to read the thing. It’s a lot like music in that sense; there’s an internal rhythm that does the work of reading for you. It almost reads itself. That’s one of the things that’s hard to teach to people. If you don’t hear music, you’re never going to hear it. That internal rhythm in a sentence or a paragraph, that’s the DNA of writing. That’s what good writing is.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER

Writer, Forgive Thyself

Writer, forgive thyself. You may write crap for years, decades, eons before your brain gets tired of being so mediocre. You will never know if that jump is possible if you don’t keep humping, every day. Numbly, you must do the necessary. Keep on slugging. Forward the light brigade. You can always fix it later. But none of this will be doable, understandable, possible, unless you get to the “the” and the “end.”

STEPHEN HUNTER

Like Listening to the Radio

I try really hard, even if there’s a minor character, to hear their memorable lines. They really do float over your head when you’re writing them, like ghosts or living people. I don’t describe them very much, just broad strokes. You don’t know necessarily how tall they are, because I don’t want to force the reader into seeing what I see. It’s like listening to the radio as a kid. I had to help, as a listener, put in all of the details. It said “blue,” and I had to figure out what shade. Or if they said it was one way, I had to see it. It’s a participatory thing.

TONI MORRISON

No One Praises the Steak

The satisfaction is in the writing and the rehearsal. Years later a letter might arrive from some far-off place that the play helped someone or enraged someone or inspired someone, and that gives a tiny flash of satisfaction. But the immediate reaction is never satisfying, because people will come prepared for what they wanted or expected your work to be, and you will be criticized for not writing three acts or for not being Tom Stoppard or Tennessee Williams. People come for the nostrums they most like, and it doesn't matter, really, what you've given them: It simply wasn't what they wanted. Steak is quite delicious, you know, but if your heart was set on trout, the steak is in for a bad evening. No one praises the steak--they bitch about the missing trout. This happens with plays and books and films all the time. Most of the time…people do not see what you tried to do or hoped to do, because they're thinking about what they wanted you to do or what they would have done, if, of course they had the talent and the will. So you go back to writing and you go back to rehearsal, and you fulsomely love those glorious actors who try to get what you did across to those lovely few who may understand that.

HAROLD PINTER

Respect Your First Draft

Respect your first draft! It’s your child, just a little uncoordinated and unkempt. Don’t throw that baby out with the bathwater. The fact that you wrote it makes it significant. You must have been trying to say something, even though the manuscript may look like subliterate Sanskrit to you now.

CAROLYN SEE

Think of Characters as Actors in a Play

The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, "This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I’m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay," you’re sunk. If they aren’t in interesting situations, characters can’t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.

P.G. WODEHOUSE

We're All Thieves

The young people ask me about becoming a writer, and they really haven’t read, not even read bad stuff. They haven’t experienced reading as happiness, as it were. So without some knowledge of what other writers have done, it’s very hard to find your own way, I think. We’re all thieves, I suppose.

JOHN UPDIKE

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