You Stop When You Know What's Going to Happen Next

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until morning when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Voice Is Very Important

This business about voice is very important. I find I take enormous inspiration as a writer of fiction, from listening to singing voices. I love to listen to Stacey Kent, who I write lyrics for, or many other singers. There's something almost impossible to capture in words about the quality of a singing performance.

KAZUO ISHIGURO

We Look for the Sermon in the Suicide

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria of what is our actual experience.

JOAN DIDION

Room for Play

I’ve never been able to write directly about things that happen to me. I need to deform them in ways to make them strange to me…. If I’m playing the court stenographer, then there isn’t going to be room for play, and if there is no room for play the work sits on the page lifeless. It’s during the play that I come up with all the weird connections, when my subtle structures come to life, when what’s best about the book starts to unfold.

JUNOT DÍAZ

Monstrous Hybrids

In a scrapyard, objects with a mix of organic and synthetic parts are called monstrous hybrids. An aluminum can, for example, with a plastic liner. Unlike pure aluminum, which can be endlessly recast, a monstrous hybrid can’t be turned into anything else. It becomes as mortal as the humans that produced it. None of us are pure aluminum, alas, consisting of a single source material. To come convincingly to life, characters have to consist of mixed-up inextricable elements. We all contain aspects of self that make us anomalies, aspects that don’t separate easily into flaws, flashbacks, and virtues.

IDRA NOVEY

The Blues

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that’s a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have. [...] Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues. If all this were to disappear off the face of the earth and some people two million unique years from now would dig out this civilization and come across some blues records, working as anthropologists, they would be able to piece together who these people were, what they thought about, what their ideas and attitudes toward pleasure and pain were, all of that. All the components of culture.

AUGUST WILSON

Internet Research

I rarely use the internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in execrable prose. It is unpleasant to sit in front of a twitching screen suffering assault by virus, power outage, sluggish searches, system crashes, the lack of direct human discourse, all in an atmosphere of scam and hustle.

ANNIE PROULX

Listen for Stories

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

EUDORA WELTY

Profundity Is Easier than Precision

Pot was a fabulous way to listen to music, emptying out the space between notes. But for writing? I’m a maximalist, and the whole point is to fill the mind. My drug of choice now is a chilled martini, but with the first sip—however shaken or stirred I’ve been at the desk—the day’s work is over. Poetry above all wants clarity of thought and feeling. The worst of it is, drugs and alcohol by midnight will inevitably have led to great insights, and as Paul Valéry once said, profundity is a hundred times easier to get than precision.

J. D. McCLATCHY

The Monster

In order to create poetry, you make a monster out of your own mind. You can’t get rid of him. He stays right with you every minute. Every minute of every day and every night. He produces terrible things—nightmare after nightmare. I’m subject to having them no less than any of the rest of them. But I don’t fool myself. I know what’s doing it. Writers start out taking something to aid the monster, to give them the poetry. Poets use alcohol, or any other kind of stimulant, to aid and abet this process, then eventually take refuge in the alcohol to help get rid of it. But by that time the monster is so highly developed he cannot be got rid of.

JAMES DICKEY