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

Be Interesting

The Number One rule, in my prose boot camps? Be interesting. This doesn’t necessarily mean zany or pyrotechnical; in fact those things can so often be like the loudmouth brayings of a narcissistic bigmouth who understands with his every drawn breath how deadly uninteresting he really is. There are infinite ways to be interesting. One way is to pursue, with passion, something, anything, beyond the realm of writing.

RICK BASS

Slow Writing

Slow writing – like long exposure photography – can bring about a sense of saturation in the material, where the time taken in the making is experienced as present in the outcome. Dwelling takes time. It is not an end-gaining activity in which a acquires b, but a transformative and relational one in which a is changed – quite probably into something quite unanticipated. It involves a process of passive attention: waiting, without necessarily knowing what for – a quality that Ben Quash, in his book of that title, names as abiding.

ELIZABETH COOK

Accept Imperfections

Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don’t try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there’s a chance you’ll never get past the first chapter.
IAIN BANKS

Layers of Revision

I think of [revision] as layers, different layers of concern.… I suppose it came about first learning from Annie Dillard to circle verbs on the page and count them, as a way of figuring out how many verbs you were using, what kind of verbs you’re using. It created an extraordinary distance between what you were writing, such that you could just look at it differently, have more distance on it. From verb tenses I went to, have I described everything? Have I said everything that needs to be said about what I want them to experience on the page, from the level of the physical? Have I described what the bodies are doing enough? 

ALEXANDER CHEE

Trust Yourself

My point of view happens to be faintly cynical or humorous—and that’s just the way I see things and that’s how it comes out when I write it. It is not anything I am conscious of, though. A piece about a “heavy” subject can be written a little bit light so the piece doesn’t seem quite as heavy. You’ve mainly got to trust yourself to write the way you feel about something.

NORA EPHRON

Stories Are for Eternity

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

TIM O’BRIEN

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