Fine Writing

Fine writing does not necessarily make a fine novel; you have concentrated so much on your undoubted skill at manipulating the English language you have forgotten the need for a developing story, a satisfactory beginning, middle and end. You have lost your reader in a welter of remarkable similes and striking metaphors. Readers are quick to pick up whether you are trying to communicate with them to the best of your skill and ability, or just showing off. The very density of fine writing can be off-putting — it’s exhausting. If you’re going to do it, at least put in lots of paragraphs.

FAY WELDON

Whom Are You Writing For?

It comes back to the question, whom are you writing for? Who are the readers you want? Who are the people you want to engage with the things that matter most to you? And for me, it’s people who don’t need it all spelled out because they know it, they understand it. That’s why there’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.

AMY HEMPEL

A Biographer Can't Be Objective

It’s really an effort to see your subject from within. That is, we imagine the biographer as an objective figure, standing outside his subject and recording and investigating what can be learned and known, but what I discovered after a lifetime of this is that the biographer is utterly enmeshed in the subject and can’t separate himself out. So the only way you can really write biography – whether the biographer’s presence is explicitly in the text or not – is to be aware of this relationship. You can be “correct,” you can be “accurate,” but you cannot be “objective.”

JAMES ATLAS

It's Fatal to Be Safe in the Arts

It is fatal to be safe in the pursuit of the arts…. You look at who and what you are, where and how you live, where and how you work, and you see that it needs to either be reformed or refined or merely appreciated. You work for something else, not merely for yourself. You struggle for something bigger and greater than yourself, and far more necessary. It cannot merely be a career, a need-filler, a dream realized. It is a calling.

EVA LE GALLIENNE

Writing Is a Long Process of Terror

The way I see writing is it’s a long process of terror punctuated by periods of intense, unsurpassed pleasure. Because you’ve dealt with two months of terror before that, you have that purple patch for a week, maybe two weeks, when you know what’s going on, you know what you’re achieving, and words come easily. Then you go back to terror. And I’m not talking about terror in the sense of “I don’t know how to plot this chapter,” but the terror of, “Why am I even writing, what a ridiculous thing to do.”

TASH AW

Cross Out Adjectives and Adverbs

Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. It is comprehensible when I write: “The man sat on the grass,” because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: “The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.” The brain can’t grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.

ANTON CHEKHOV

Writing for the Tribe

I once read another writer, I forget whom, saying that their writing was a sort of wolf call to their tribe, and I think there’s some truth in that; I write for my tribe, an imaginary group of readers who are a bit like me on the inside. They’ve quite often screwed things up in their lives, and they’re not always shiny and happy, because even the most average of lives contains great battles—growing up, finding meaning, living with loss, addiction, disability, infertility—but they’re trying to fight those battles with courage and humor.

ALICE ADAMS

The Color of Poetry

The Japanese have this idea of the color of a poem. Bashō talks often about the colors of poems. I think what he means by that is the moods and the tones, the sort of aesthetic principles of them. And I think that you can’t just sit down and write that, you have to really embody it. That’s the hardest part: figuring out what tone or what mood you’re writing towards. A lot of this has to do with the themes you’re working with, or the mode that you want to present. That takes sometimes weeks, months — years, really — to develop before language comes to fruition. Language has its own register, like music, and depending on the “octave” or the tone that you’re using, there are connotations, there are meanings, implicit in tone.

OCEAN VUONG

Slow Writing

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

Beware of Yellow Volkswagens

The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it—to remember, to keep in mind — as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain—to the end of the story—and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you’re going to have a very irritated reader on your hands.

FRANK CONROY