The Subject Takes Command

The writer must never attempt to impose himself upon his subject. He must not try to mold it according to what he believes his readers or editors want to read. His initial task is to come to know his subject intimately, to understand its every aspect, to let it fill his mind. Then at some turning point the subject takes command and the true act of creation begins…. The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

RACHEL CARSON

Listen to People Talking

Listen always to people talking. Listen to patterns of thinking displayed in talking. Think about this: if a husband comes home at night and says to his wife, “What do you think happened to me? When I got onto the bus tonight I sat down next to a girl and when the conductor came along he had a live penguin riding on his head, a live penguin, can you imagine? And when I looked at it, it turned out it was a talking penguin and it said “Tickets, please,” and there was this guy across the aisle and you really won’t believe this but it turned out he had a parrot in his pocket and the parrot put out his head and he and the penguin got to talking and I never heard anything like it in all my life,” don’t you know that after the husband has said all this his wife is going to say, “What did the girl look like?”

SHIRLEY JACKSON

Your Two Choices as an Artist

If you believe that life is fundamentally a volcano full of baby skulls, you’ve got two main choices as an artist: You can either stare into the volcano and count the skulls for the thousandth time and tell everybody, There are the skulls; that’s your baby, Mrs. Miller. Or you can try to build walls so that fewer baby skulls go in.

JOHN GARDNER

The Ocean of Art

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Writers Are the Among the Most Probing of Artists

Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, and to mystify the familiar — all this is the test of her or his power. The languages she or he uses (imagistic, structural, narrative) and the social and historical context in which these languages signify are indirect and direct revelations of that power and its limitations.

TONI MORRISON

Writing Must Not Be Compartmentalized

[Grace Paley] taught me that writing must not be compartmentalized. You don’t step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person. People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say.

ANN PATCHETT

A Lot of Good Fiction Is Sentimental

I like grit. I like love and death. I’m tired of irony. A lot of good fiction is sentimental. The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior and then he just dries up. I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments and take a chance on being corny than die a smartass.

JIM HARRISON

Vigorous Writing Is Concise

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

WILLIAM STRUNK, JR.

Lying Novelists

I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

MAYA ANGELOU

Accretive Details

Writing fiction is about accumulating stuff — details about setting, details about clothing and behavior and actions and speech patterns and all the rick-rack of objects that we surround ourselves with. If you don’t like amassing this barge load of material, you may not be comfortable with fiction itself, or at least realist fiction, which has a tendency to fill up the page with accretive details. 

CHARLES BAXTER