There are two ways of looking at writing. One way is that you’re telling a story transparently. The other is that you’re telling a story with language, and language is the point. How fast do you want your story to read? If it reads too fast then it might be superficial. A person reads it in five minutes, it’s all over.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience. I saw a car crash when I was fifteen here in Los Angeles and five people died as a result of it. I arrived at the scene within twenty seconds of hearing the collision. It was the worst mistake I ever made in my life. I didn’t know what I was running into. People had been horribly mangled and decapitated. So for months after, I was shaken. It’s probably the reason I never learned to drive. I was terrified of automobiles for a long time after that but I turned it into a short story called “The Crowd” six or seven years later…. So out of this horror—this really terrible event—you take something that has taught you a certain kind of fear and you pass on to others and say, “This is what the car can do.”
RAY BRADBURY
Writing about sex is kind of like writing about music. It’s a thing that isn’t about words, really, and doesn’t lend itself to verbal descriptions. When I’m writing sex scenes, I don’t ever think about how the scene is going to unfold. I just put myself there with the people, and they do what they do. I don’t think people ever know why anything is erotic. I don’t think we need to know. People often know what they like, although if they’re lucky they might be surprised. But I do think it’s mysterious.
MARY GAITSKILL
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
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, 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
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
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
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
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
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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