You Must Not Come Lightly to the Blank Page

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

STEPHEN KING

The Reader Comes First

Most of the fact writing has become selfish writing. The writers don’t think about the reader but about themselves. They’re all trying to show their wonderful minds and their unique unhappinesses and their fascinating adjustments and so on. Writing is for the reader. [The reader] always comes first.

MAEVE BRENNAN

"Authentic Experience"

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.

CHARLES SIMIC

Decide Where Your Allegiance Is

First, make sure that you’re trying to write in the realm that you like to read. A lot of times, I find that people say they want to write, but most of their reference points have to do with television. If you are serving a literary god, then write and read literary stuff. You have to decide where your allegiance really is, and it tends to be in the realm that you like to consume.

JENNIFER EGAN

The Best Mask of All

You have to be awfully naive not to understand that a writer is a performer who puts on the act he does best—not least when he dons the mask of the first-person singular. That may be the best mask of all for a second self. Some (many) pretend to be more lovable than they are and some pretend to be less. Beside the point. Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. The question to ask about the writer isn’t ‘Why does he behave so badly?’ but ‘What does he gain by wearing this mask?

PHILIP ROTH

Cultivate Arrogance

The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence – arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you. A book isn’t quickly achieved and the road to publication can be strewn with obstacles. It is especially important to be self-confident if you have no contacts and do not know other writers. If you are unpublished you can still say to yourself, “I am a writer.” You should define yourself as such.

HILARY MANTEL

Style Is a Relation Between Form and Content

Style is a relation between form and content. Where the content is less than the form, where the author pretends to emotion which he does not feel, the language will seem flamboyant. The more ignorant a writer feels, the more artificial becomes his style. A writer who thinks himself cleverer than his readers writes simply, one who is afraid they are cleverer than he, will make use of mystification: good style is arrived at when the chosen represents what the author requires of it without mystification.

CYRIL CONNOLLY

Great Artists Are Great Workers

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration…[shining] down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, and bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…. All great artists and thinkers [are] great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

Examine Your Motives

Examine your motives. Are you drawn to fiction writing because it can be performed cheaply at home? Are you an alcoholic looking for an excuse to sleep late? Writing is for compulsive storytellers. So are a lot of things—police work, diplomacy, counseling the needy, etc. Before you commit to writing as a career, make sure you’re not simply agoraphobic or depressed.

NELL ZINK

Stop Thinking

It’s funny, I teach writing, and before I taught I never would have guessed the thing I say most often is: “Please stop thinking.” But people really write better without thinking, by which I mean without self-consciousness. I’m not calculating about what I write, which means I have very little control over it. It’s not that I decide what to write and carry it out. It’s more that I grope my way towards something—not even knowing what it is until I’ve arrived. I’ve gotten better over the years at accepting this. Of course, the intellect wants to kick in—and, in the later drafts, it should. But in the early stages of a book, I deal with potential self-consciousness by literally hushing the critical voices in my head. The voices that tell you: “Oh, those aren’t the words you want,” or “you shouldn’t be working on this part now,” or “why not use the present tense?”—on and on. Anyone who’s ever written anything is familiar with that chorus.

KATHRYN HARRISON