Don’t overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualized, but functional – like figures in a painting. Think of Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Mocked, in which a patiently suffering Jesus is closely surrounded by four threatening men. Each of the characters is unique, and yet each represents a type; and collectively they form a narrative that is all the more powerful for being so tightly and so economically constructed.
SARAH WATERS
I think humans are the most interesting thing I know about. They’re inexhaustibly interesting. And I think one of the great beauties of the novel as a form is that it shows us that human nature is the great constant. Human nature is the same in all places, in all times, in all languages. And that makes it the great subject of any writer’s life, just to try and explore this vast ocean of human beings.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I’m a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. I see it happen all the time. Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn’t mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don’t think any of that was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don’t sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won’t be sitting there.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
This credo I hereby affirm. I will never say marginalize or use privilege as a verb. I will avoid closure except perhaps when discussing the endings of poems. I will avoid gnostic altogether. I will not say societal and comedic where social and comic will serve just as well. I will not say hegemony except with irony. I will not put nestled, cradled, or shimmered in poems, and I will stop reading any poem that has cupped in it, or scrim, sure signs of poetical intent. I will not split infinitives if I can help it. I will use correct grammar, but I will feel free to leave out punctuation marks when it suits my purposes in a poem. I will welcome new oxymorons, as when a friend complains that she has “an ancient computer.” I will allow no-brainer and Prozac and feng shui into my poetry, not to mention the Net, the Web, the Windows software that came with the box, my laptop, my desktop, my ergonomic workstation, the bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome I suffered a few years ago, and other things that would have made no sense to anyone thirty years ago. I will love the language as a living thing that never stops evolving.
DAVID LEHMAN
When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you’ll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don’t shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.
ANTON CHEKHOV
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 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
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
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 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
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
Copyright © Jon Winokur 2019-2025. All rights reserved. Website by Wei-Haas Creative.
The trademark AdviceToWriters® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.