A writer’s only possible relation to his or her failings has to be one of gratitude. First because there are hundreds of other writers out there whose strengths lie precisely in these areas of weakness. Second because these weaknesses oblige us to concentrate on the one or two little areas that are uniquely – and, as far as every other writer is concerned, undesirably – our own.
GEOFF DYER
Those [paragraphs] that need reworking I do as long as I can. I mean I’ve revised six times, seven times, thirteen times. But there’s a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death. It is important to know when you are fretting it; when you are fretting it because it is not working, it needs to be scrapped.
TONI MORRISON
A piece of advice given by the German Romantic Ludwig Börne: “For three successive days, force yourself to write, without denaturalizing or hypocrisy, everything that crosses your mind. Write what you think of yourself, your wives, Goethe, the Turkish war, the Last Judgment, your superiors, and you will be stupefied to see how many new thoughts have poured forth. That is what constitutes the art of becoming an original writer in three days.
EMMANUEL CARRÈRE
Here is one of the greatest pitfalls for beginning or inexperienced writers: Their stories are, far too often, just simply not very interesting. It is easy to be trapped in a story you are writing, and to suppose that the interest you feel yourself in the story is automatically communicated to the reader; this is terribly important to me, the writer tells himself, this is a matter of the most extreme importance to me, and therefore a reader will find it important, too. And the reader, opening one sleepy eye, thinks that the fellow who wrote this thing was certainly pretty worked up about something, wasn’t he; funny how hard it is to stay awake while you are reading it.
SHIRLEY JACKSON
A lot of times, you can’t see what it is that you’re working on until you have had some distance from it. And part of getting that distance, for me, is writing it out. It’s almost like a process of self-analysis. I know that there are writers out there who outline and then write from the outline, and my process is actually the reverse, which is that I write first and then I have to go back and I outline what it is that I was writing about. Then I can look and say … That must be something that my mind is turning over.
CELESTE NG
The first draft often feels like dross. Don’t beat yourself up too much. You’re gold mining. There might be a lot to sift through. But at the end, when you’re tired and it feels like you’ve got to send it off right now, put it away, for weeks, a month. Then take another hard look. (But do send it out eventually — you don’t want to be a George McFly.)
JESSE ARMSTRONG
I hate to say this, but...sometimes the first draft is best. I don’t mean the first draft of a whole thing, but sometimes the first version of a moment or a scene, or even a line of dialog, is the best one. And sometimes the twentieth or fiftieth is the best one. It’s really weird and hard to account for.
COURTNEY BALESTIER
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 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 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
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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