Humor

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension. It may be buried in the story by the author or buried in the world of the story—a shallow grave will suffice—or the reader may bring his or her own sedimented feelings to bear upon the reading. Often it is several things simultaneously. Some expectation, however, must be disrupted. Wordplay itself is not usually funny, only clever, unless it is attached to some other psychological force in the narrative. (I am often interested in mishearings—part of the comedy of misunderstanding—which employs an accidentally generated wordplay. These mishearings I often collect from real life.) Most of the humor I’m interested in has to do with awkwardness; the makeshift theater that springs up between people at really awkward times—times of collision, emergency, surrealism, aftermath, disorientation. Bad jokes may be an expression of that awkwardness, without being inherently funny themselves. Of course, in including humor in narrative a writer isn’t doing anything especially artificial. Humor is just part of the texture of human conversation and life. Storymaking aside, in real life people are always funny. Or, people are always funny eventually. It would be dishonest to pretend not to notice.”

LORRIE MOORE

The Idea on Which Fiction Is Built

This is the idea on which fiction is built. When I call up the concept “my first kiss,” neurons light up in my head (a golf course! A 1969 Camaro! The smell of a now-discontinued 1970s perfume!). Then I type that phrase and you read it and neurons light up in your head in a pattern similar, but not identical to, the one in my head, and we are both, somehow, united, around the concept “first kiss.”

GEORGE SAUNDERS

Go Deeper

So many writers write small, shallow things in a complicated, difficult style. I think what I want to do is write serious, complicated, difficult things in a very easy style that is fluid and comfortable to read. In order to write those difficult things, you have to be willing to go down, deeper and deeper. So, in the forty years that I’ve been writing, I have worked out a technique for that. It’s like a physical technique—not an intellectual technique. I think if you’re a fiction writer and you’re too intelligent, you cannot write. But if you’re stupid, you cannot write. You have to find a position in between. That is very difficult.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Gratitude

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

Revision vs. Fretting

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

Force Yourself to Write

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

One of the Great Pitfalls for Beginning Writers

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

Write It Out

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

Don't Beat Yourself Up

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

Sometimes the First Draft Is Best

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