The short-story writer’s first concern, once he has mastered his subject, is to study what musicians call the “attack.” The rule that the first page of a novel ought to contain the germ of the whole is even more applicable to the short story, because in the latter case the trajectory is so short that flash and sound nearly coincide.
EDITH WHARTON
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round. The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr. Micawber." There is Mrs. Micawber — she says she won’t desert Mr. Micawber; she doesn’t, and there she is.
E.M. FORSTER
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language—all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas…. Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?
TONI MORRISON
Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot— the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.
BILLY WILDER
Stop NOT writing. Just do it, badly. Just write the thing you need or want to write, that you are avoiding. That avoidance is costing you greatly, isometrically, and in general well-being. So can you find one measly hour, to write, badly?
ANNE LAMOTT
Apart from being civilized peaceful work, translating can bring unique rewards: the translator is the only one to really read the text, to read it in depth, in all its nuances, weighing and appreciating every word and every image, or perhaps detecting voids and untruths. When the translator manages to come up with or even to invent a solution for a crux, he feels godlike, without the responsibility that burdens the author. In this sense, the joys and efforts of translating compared to creative writing are like the joys and efforts of grandparents compared to those of parents
PRIMO LEVI
I strongly believe that writing is an act of courage. It’s almost an act of physical courage. You get up and you have this great idea. Maybe you were hanging out with your friends—you guys were having beers and you were talking about something. You had this idea and they said, “Wow, that’s brilliant! Someone should go write it.” And you sit down to write it and almost always what was brilliant before, when you were sitting around talking, is somehow not so brilliant when you go to write. It’s as though you have a certain music in your head, and trying to get that music out on a page is absolute hell. And so you fail. If you’re doing it correctly, what happens is, the translation of what you hear in your head, what your idea is in your head, will almost always come out really badly on the page when you first write, okay? But what you have to do is you have to give yourself a day, go back, revise over and over and over again until you get something that is at least maybe 70 percent of what you wanted to do. You try to go from really bad to okay to acceptable. Then you know you’ve done your job. I never really get to that perfect thing that was in my head, so I always consider the entire process about failure. I think that’s the main reason why more people don’t write. It’s very depressing in that way.
TA-NEHISI COATES
It was so simple yet so profound. So obvious yet so overlooked. One word at a time. One sentence. One book. It mimicked the structure of life. One moment. One day. One life. As books were written in words, life was lived in moments. The word I was paying attention to would lead to the next. The moment I was living in now would roll into my future. When I went back to write, I noticed that when I focused on the words in front of me, the fears about the rest of the book dissolved. The same thing happened when I focused on the moment. Actually, when I focused on the moment, two things happened: I didn’t have the time or mental space to worry about the future, and because I was paying attention to the moment, the future took care of itself. Because the future was the result of moments, and when I was living as presently in the moment as possible, I didn’t have to worry so much about what could be. When I took care of the dishwasher now, I didn’t have to find time to do it later. When I did well on my work presentation, I didn’t need to worry about the security of my job, the scrutiny of my boss, later. When I focused on this chapter, I didn’t need to fear the one after it. And that’s when I began trusting myself, in a way I never had before. I trusted myself to live in the present, in a way that would take care of my future self. And the more I trusted myself, the less I saw myself worrying about the future.
LAUREN MARTIN
It’s not the same with every book. Generally, I think I can say that the general idea is the first, followed almost immediately by the major characters. We live in a sea of general ideas, so that’s not a novel, since there are so many general ideas. But the moment a particular idea is linked to a character, it’s like an engine moves it. Then you have a novel underway.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Feedback is great, from your editor, your agent, your readers, your friends, your classmates, but there are times when you know exactly what you’re doing and why and obeying them means being out of tune with yourself. Listen to your own feedback and remember that you move forward through mistakes and stumbles and flawed but aspiring work, not perfect pirouettes performed in the small space in which you initially stood. Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people. Write for other people, but don’t listen to them too much.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
Copyright © Jon Winokur 2019-2025. All rights reserved. Website by Wei-Haas Creative.
The trademark AdviceToWriters® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.