As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right, somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.
ARUNDHATI ROY
Either you want to tell a story or you don’t. Do you want to draw attention to yourself and your own writing and your beautiful style or do you want to be invisible and let the story and the characters take over for the reader. That’s what it comes down to for me. What comes into it with crime is just conflicts. I like conflict in any kind of popular art. There is no greater conflict than life versus death, so there it is. I’m not that interested in the crime aspect of my books. I am interested in the characters.
GEORGE PELECANOS
I tried my hand at working on the nails, but I…discovered my greatest flaw as a artist. I had no patience. I realized patience was a skill I did not possess. And I think that's why I became a writer. Because when you're a writer, within a single sentence, a city can rise or fall. It could be daylight or nighttime. And if you write it, it's true. A couple seconds later, there it is. But working in the salon takes meticulous patience. Your hand has to be steady. It takes your whole body. Your whole coiled body is wrapped in the attention of beauty.
OCEAN VUONG
I try to see as much as possible—in microscopic detail. I have an exercise that helps me with this, using old family photographs. I’ll blow an image up as much as I can, and work through it pixel by pixel. This isn’t the way we typically look at pictures—where we take in the whole gestalt, eyes focusing mostly on the central image. I’ll start at, say, a corner, looking at every detail. And the strangest things happen: you end up noticing things you never would have noticed. Sometimes, I’ve discovered crucial, overlooked details that are important to my family’s story. This process is a metaphor for the way I work—it’s the same process of looking closely, looking carefully, looking in the unexpected places, and being receptive to what you find there.
AMY TAN
If you want to be very good at this, the road is consciousness. Am I repeating this motif? Is this plausible? Does this track logically? Are the paragraph breaks in the right place? Is this information exposited too early? When should this man meet this woman? That was the gradual electrifying revelation – if one has native talent of the level I possess, then it’s about consciousness.
JAMES ELLROY
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say “one chooses” with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all—has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me?
GRAHAM GREENE
I think there are very few rules that can’t be broken. I think there is only one that is very difficult to break. I have seen it broken, but not very often. It’s that something has to change. From the beginning of the story to the end, something needs to be different. The only time I’ve ever seen it successfully broken was a Grace Paley story called “A Conversation With My Father.” But as a general rule, something has to change. There has to be some source of tension.
MARY GAITSKILL
The actual mechanics of songwriting is only understandable up to a certain point, and it’s frustrating because it’s at that point that it begins to matter. Creativity is an act of magic rising up from your subconscious. It feels wonderful every time it happens, and I’ve learned to live with the anxiety of it not happening over long periods of time.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
First, make sure that you’re trying to write in the realm that you like to read. A lot of times, I find that people say they want to write, but most of their reference points have to do with television. If you are serving a literary god, then write and read literary stuff. You have to decide where your allegiance really is, and it tends to be in the realm that you like to consume.
JENNIFER EGAN
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
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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