Books Take Care of Themselves

Novelists—especially novelists who paint on a broad canvas—are generally not given to undue anxiety, I think. The task is so enormous that if we ever really thought about what we were letting ourselves in for, we'd never begin. Early on we learn to worry only about what we do today. If I get my two or three pages written on Monday my day's work is done. It's useless to worry about Friday or four years from Friday. Pages need our attention; books take care of themselves.

RICHARD RUSSO

Total Knowledge Is Impossible

Each novel I’ve written, any novel anyone writes, it’s not that you sit down saying “I believe this, and now I will write this,” but by the nature of your sentences, just by the things that you emphasize or that you don’t emphasize, you’re constantly expressing a belief about the way you think the world is, about the things that you think are important, and those things change. They do change. And the form of the novel changes as well. A very simple example is in a lot of my fiction I’ve delved very deeply into people’s heads, into their consciousness and tried to take out every detail, and the older I get and the more that I meet people and realize I don’t know them. My own husband is a stranger to me, really, fundamentally at the end you don’t know these people. That should be reflected in what you write, that total knowledge is impossible.

ZADIE SMITH

Never Write In a Café

Never write in a café, especially in Europe. Ever since Hemingway, this has been the literary equivalent of what in mountain climbing is called the "tech weenie" (that is, someone who cannot get a foot off the ground but is weighed down with $10,000’s worth of equipment). Literary skill, much less greatness, cannot be had with a pose, and exhibitionism extorts the price of failure. Also, have pity on the weary Parisians who have wanted only a citron pressé but have been unable to find a café where every single seat is not occupied by an American publicly carrying on a torrid affair with his moleskin.

MARK HELPRIN

Define What You Know

There is a kind of central truth and if you get the central truth, and the motion of people, then the rest is implied. Henry James talks about this in The Art of Fiction. He writes about a woman writer he knew who ran up the stairs of a little French house in Paris, and on her way up she passed a room with a door open and inside there was a meeting going on of French Huguenots—this was in the nineteenth century—and they were smoking cigarettes and talking. She was only there for half a minute; she paused and then she went on. Two or three years later she wrote a book about the Huguenots, and everything in it, as Henry James said, was absolutely true. She just went from that one moment. Now, I was very careful not to tell my students to only write about what you know, because I couldn’t define what they knew. That’s where the question really begins. How to define what you know. And what she knew and sensed in that second was everything.

PAULA FOX

Writing Is a Monstrous Act

Writing is a monstrous act because it implies a metamorphosis. Writing, to me, is an attempt at becoming someone else. Every novel is a long way of tracing an x, of crossing myself out. I don’t want to be on the page. I want someone else to be there—someone else to “happen.” Still, despite my best efforts, I always remain, deformed and disfigured. The final paradox, of course, is that I am the one striking myself out. And isn’t this duality also quite monstrous?

HERNAN DIAZ

Learn How to Read Your Work

People say, I write for myself, and it sounds so awful and so narcissistic, but in a sense if you know how to read your own work—that is, with the necessary critical distance—it makes you a better writer and editor. When I teach creative writing, I always speak about how you have to learn how to read your work; I don’t mean enjoy it because you wrote it. I mean, go away from it, and read it as though it is the first time you’ve ever seen it. Critique it that way. Don’t get all involved in your thrilling sentences and all that . . .

TONI MORRISON

Writing Is a Lonely Occupation

Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He moves into a realm where he has never been before — perhaps where no one has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening.

RACHEL CARSON

Just Listen

For years I’d see reporters come in with lists of questions to ask. They had to get through that list, no matter what. You’d never do that with jazz artists. Forget the questions. Listen. Duke [Ellington] used to say to me, "I don’t want people listening to my music to analyze what the chords are or what we’re doing with the rhythms. I want them to open up to the music." It's the same thing with interviewing. I just listen, and the questions come from that.

NAT HENTOFF

Write What You Wish to Write

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Publishing a Book Is Terrible

It is only slightly exaggerating to say that everything about publishing a book is terrible, even when things go well. Maybe this is a matter of temperament, and people blessed with good temperaments live in full knowledge of the wonder and sense of grace they should feel about every aspect of the privilege it is to put a book into the world, and it just happens that I and every writer I know have bad temperaments. For Philip Roth, who published some thirty-plus books and won every possible literary award—or every award but one—writing was “frustration, daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.” If writing felt like humiliation to Philip Roth, what hope do any of the rest of us have? The idea that some sign of outward success, some award or sales figure, could satisfy us is a mistake, I think. The soul one pours into a novel or a collection of poems, the years of effort a book represents—what possible response from the world could be adequate recompense for that?

GARTH GREENWELL