Put Your Money in the Bank

The curse of all successful writers is the dream of all Americans: owning a house. Houses have ruined a lot of literary artists, more so than drugs or drink. Jack London built himself a palace and then committed suicide. Mark Twain almost went bust maintaining his Connecticut digs.… If I had one piece of advice to give to aspirant writers it would be: Don’t—don’t, don’t, don’t—under any circumstances buy a house you could not afford if you were a plumber’s assistant. Or, as a veteran Hollywood agent told me not long ago: Put your money in the bank; if you buy anything, pay cash, and if you can’t pay cash, don’t buy it.

PHILIP CAPUTO

A Magical Act

From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.

JOHN UPDIKE

Pebble By Pebble

It is just pebble by pebble by pebble by pebble. I write one sentence until I am happy with it until I go on to the next one and write that one until I am happy with it. And I look at my paragraph and if I am not happy with that I’ll write the paragraph until I’m happy with it and then I go on this way. And, of course, even writing this very slow way, one does have to go back. One does start off on the wrong foot sometimes and a whole scene has to be chopped and you have to start over again. Generally, you know that pretty quickly though. You realize you have painted yourself into a corner and you think, "Okay I am just going to trace my footsteps back to the last solid bit of ground that I know. Look around start again and take a different tack." It’s the way that William Styron writes and he said, when he was about my age, that he realized that he had maybe four or five books in him—the way that he worked—and he said he was fine with that. I’m fine with that too. It’s okay by me.

DONNA TARTT

Abiding

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

It Starts with Passion

Talent is overrated, and it is usually conflated with nice style. Passion, vocation, vision, and dedication are rarer, and they will get you through the rough spots in your style when your style won’t give you a reason to get up in the morning and stare at the manuscript for the hundredth day in a row or even give you a compelling subject to write about. If you’re not passionate about writing and about the world and the things in it you’re writing about, then why are you writing? It starts with passion even before it starts with words. You want to read people who are wise, deep, wild, kind, committed, insightful, attentive; you want to be those people. I am all for style, but only in service of vision.

REBECCA SOLNIT

Mush On

There’s only one way I know to come back after a failure. And that’s fast. It’s the one sure way to revive your confidence in yourself. After enough years, you begin treating your failures in the same way as you do your successes. Either one is the natural consequence of your work, and so you just mush on, regardless of the outcome of your most recent experience.

LARRY GELBART

Let It In

It’s that being open—not scratching for it, not digging for it, not constructing something but being open to the situation and trusting that what you don’t know will be available to you. It is bigger than your overt consciousness or your intelligence or even your gifts; it is out there somewhere and you have to let it in.

TONI MORRISON

Never Mind What It Means

Never mind what it means. Get it down. Get it written. Perhaps you do not know what it means. Let others tell you what it means to them. It is your story; it is all you have. Tell it. Write it down. It is suicidal to contemplate your meaning, your theme, your reason for being before a single jot is on a page. Get it on the page, and then you can play with it; revise it; sculpt it; abort it. But get it done. There is an awful lot of not getting it done going on right now.

HAROLD PINTER

It Only Takes One Buyer

There are a great many scripts, and only a certain number of movies get made. You just do the math. It’s like if you’re an actor. You go out for fifty jobs, and if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get one of them. The math is against you, and the rejection is part of what you do, so you keep doing it. It only takes one buyer, and sometimes it takes years to find that buyer. When you’re starting out, you’re sort of curious about why they passed, but you never get the right answer anyway, so you just learn to say, “Okay, so they passed. Next?”

PAUL SCHRADER

You Just Do It

The whole “Can I call myself a writer?” question I found so odd, as if it’s some sort of identity that is separate from the actual act of writing. It’s very, very strange to me. There is no secret password to being a writer. There is no secret code. You just do it. People would like to imagine that the work involved is not just the writing itself. There’s serious work in writing. It’s not something other than that, really.

LYNNE TILLMAN