Don't Fight It

I tell my students, your brain is probably telling you something important. It’s saying you’re not ready. Take that image with you. Go on a walk and live your life and maybe something about your life. You pay attention to it, can show you how to write that thing. Don’t fight it. So much of our culture is bent on fighting David and Goliath, wrestling the muse. We look at creation as a battleground. And I think it’s one of the greatest detriments to creativity is to see ourselves as participants in a war when it should be participants in creation.

OCEAN VUONG

Don't Be Afraid to Write Garbage

I feel like it’s all about don’t be afraid to write lots of garbage (but also don’t throw any of it away). Have a very large storage system for all that garbage, because it’s only garbage in context. It may turn out to be a treasure in some other context you haven’t discovered yet.

COURTNEY BALESTIER

It's Like Wrestling

It is like wrestling; you are wrestling with ideas and with the story. There is a lot of energy required. At the same time, it is exciting. So it is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing. I have said in the kind of exaggerated manner of writers and prophets that writing, for me, is like receiving a term of imprisonment — you know that’s what you’re in for, for whatever time it takes.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Keep Reading

It’s really important to feel passionate and driven about what it is you are working on. I never really understood people who say they have writer’s block. It seems to me that the natural remedy to that would be to keep reading. There just isn’t an idea there, but no need to be stressed about that. There’s this seasonal nature to inspiration that we have to harvest. There’s the winter and then the spring, and then wait for the summer for it all to ripen. I’m quite happy in my creative winter.

ELEANOR CATTON

A Character's Motivation

A character can be sharp-witted, twisted, arrogant, contradictory, vain, narcissistic, boorish, even morally repugnant (think Tony Soprano)—as long as the reader understands the character’s motivations. When readers don’t respond, the problem isn’t the character’s misery or self-absorption or churlishness. (Here I’m thinking of Emma Bovary.) The problem is that the reader can’t see far enough beneath the character’s surface actions to understand the deeper feelings underneath.

CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE

A Novel Is Like Falling in Love

It’s very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way—just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don’t say, “I’m going to fall in love next Tuesday, I’m going to begin my novel.” The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.

NORMAN MAILER

Be Disciplined

Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish–they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.

SARAH WATERS

Books Are Made Like Pyramids

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 

The Most Important Things

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

STEPHEN KING

There's a Sureness to Good Writing

There’s a sureness to good writing even when what’s being written about doesn’t make all that much sense. It’s the sureness of the so-called seat of an accomplished horseback rider or a sailor coming about in a strong wind. The words have both muscle and grace, familiarity and surprise. If forced to choose one writer of the 20th century who has these qualities most abundantly, I would name Vladimir Nabokov, who makes me want to take back everything I said about adjectives, except that each of his is chosen as carefully as an engagement ring: "On her brown shoulder, a raised purple-pink swelling (the work of some gnat) which I eased of its beautiful transparent poison between my long thumbnails and then sucked till I was gorged on her spicy blood."

ANNE BERNAYS