If words are the flesh, muscle, and bone of prose, punctuation is the breath. In support of the words you’ve carefully selected, punctuation is your best means of conveying to the reader how you mean your writing to be read, how you mean for it to sound. A comma sounds different than a semicolon; parentheses make a different noise than dashes.
BENJAMIN DREYER
There are certain things I don’t talk about. I have kept diaries, of course, but they can’t be read for quite a long time. What will emerge when people read them? I can’t imagine that anything will emerge that can’t be deduced from reading any of my books now. This is why I’m always curious about people who are fascinated by writers’ lives. It seems to me that we’re always in our books, quite nakedly. I wonder, too, does the private life really matter? Who cares what is known about you and what isn’t? Even when you make public something that’s been private, most people don’t get it—not unless they’re the same generation and have gone through more or less the same experiences. So, in a sense, we’re all private, by definition.
DORIS LESSING
I’ve heard that a writer is lucky because he cures himself every day with his work. What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life — this is, if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway — but you won’t know it. And, the thing is, in order to sit alone and work alone all day long, you must be a terrible overreacter. You’re sitting there doing what paranoids do — putting together clues, making them add up…. Putting the fact that they put me in room 471…. What does that mean and everything? Well, nothing means anything — except the artist makes his living by pretending, by putting it in a meaningful hole, though no such holes exist.
KURT VONNEGUT
This is why you have to know everything there is to know about the protagonist’s specific internal problem before you create the plot, and why this knowledge will then, with astonishing speed, begin to generate the plot itself. Story first, plot second, so that your novel has the juice to instantly captivate your readers, biologically hooking them before they know what hit them.
LISA CRON
If it should occur to you to cut, do so. That’s the first basic rule of cutting. If you’re reading through and stop, something is wrong. Cut it. If something bothers you, then it’s bad. Cut it. If you can cut inside the speech, you’re really cutting most effectively.
PADDY CHAYEFSKY
You can teach almost anyone determined to learn the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into. I can't remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: "No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep."
ANNE BERNAYS
My favorite food is scrambled eggs. In the original typescript of Live and Let Die, James Bond consumed scrambled eggs so often that a perceptive proof-reader suggested that this rigid pattern of life must be becoming a security risk for Bond. If he was being followed, his tail would only have to go into restaurants and say “Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?” to know whether he was on the right track or not. So I had to go through the book changing the menus.
IAN FLEMING
What fun would a murder mystery be if the murderer was plain to see up front? Mystery relies on feeding us options and opportunities for guessing right—and guessing way wrong. A red herring is the literary technique of boldly played misdirection—the origin of the idiom is that, if you wanted to get hounds off your scent, you could use the skin of a red herring to draw their attention, thus drawing them away from their actual target.
CHUCK WENDIG
Tell the story that’s been growing in your heart, the characters you can’t keep out of your head, the tale that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning. Don’t write something just because you think it will sell, or fit into the pigeonhole du jour. Tell the story you want to tell, and worry about how to sell it later.
JENNIFER WEINER
I just write what I want to write. Quiet is very beautiful to me, the medium of everything that matters. I’m grateful for the patience of my readers, certainly. But the fact is that a novel takes over a writer’s life for literal years. What I write, day by day and word by word, is much of my felt life. It would be a terrible capitulation to give up my explorations of quiet because of anxiety about the receptiveness of readers. I have found that readers are very much to be trusted.
MARILYNNE ROBINSON
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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