Elaborate Impersonation

Writing for me isn’t a natural thing that I just keep doing, the way fish swim and birds fly. It’s something that’s done under a certain kind of provocation, a particular urgency. It’s the transformation, through an elaborate impersonation, of a personal emergency into a public act (in both senses of that word). It can be a very trying spiritual exercise to siphon through your being qualities that are alien to your moral makeup—as trying for the writer as for the reader. You can wind up feeling more like a sword-swallower than a ventriloquist or impersonator. You sometimes use yourself very harshly in order to reach what is, literally speaking, beyond you. The impersonator can’t afford to indulge the ordinary human instincts which direct people in what they want to present and what they want to hide.

PHILIP ROTH

It Never Gets Easier

It never gets easier to write. The fantasy exists that once certain hurdles have been gotten through, this art turns much simpler, that inspiration never falters, and public opinion is always affirmative, and there’s no struggle, there’s no torment, there’s no sense that the thing you’ve embarked on is a catastrophe.

LOUISE GLÜCK

Comedy Is the Riskiest Genre

Comedy is the riskiest form, the riskiest genre. There’s a simple logic to comedy, especially when it comes to film or literature: if people don’t think it’s funny, it’s instantly dead—the project, the narrative, whether it’s a film or a book, is stillborn. And that’s the risk. Unlike drama in film or literature or in any serious project where the reader’s or viewer’s understanding can be delayed to some extent—someone can engage with a film or a book for ten, fifteen, twenty days or two years and keep coming back to it—with comedy, if it’s not funny the first time around, it will never be funny.

ALEKSANDAR HEMON                                                             

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