Just Write as Well as You Can

The best advice came from my agent, when I was a year or so into my career. I was dithering about a future project, saying that there was a way to do it that would be accessible and commercial, and a way to do it that would be smart but unpopular. He said, “Just write as well as you can.” That advice has saved me years. I never again asked the question, of myself or anyone else. It’s the only way to work—don’t write to what you perceive as a market. Don’t write out of anyone’s need except your own. Don’t try to cater to an audience you think may not be keeping up with you—find the audience who will. I have amplified the advice in my mind: just serve your subject. Each book makes different and fierce demands. Each one uses up all you can do. Later you may be able to do more.

HILARY MANTEL

Everybody Gets Stuck

I’ve found over the years that any momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. So if I’m in this room and then I go into the other room, it helps me. If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower it’s a big help. So I sometimes take extra showers. I’ll be in the living room and at an impasse and what will help me is to go upstairs and take a shower. It breaks up everything and relaxes me. I go out on my terrace a lot. One of the best things about my apartment is that it’s got a long terrace and I’ve paced it a million times writing movies. It’s such a help to change the atmosphere.

WOODY ALLEN

Pray the Prototypes Don't Sue

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience.... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characteristics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won’t sue.

WALLACE STEGNER

It's Performance

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours—an actress—was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn't plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live.

JOAN DIDION

Writer's Block Does Not Exist

Who’s heard of writer’s block? I really don’t think it exists. Actually, no, sorry, I’m going to take that back: it does not exist. We’ll state it flatly. Sometimes, writing is super hard. Just like any other job. Or, if it’s not your job, sometimes it’s hard to do a thing even if it is your hobby. But no plumber ever gets to call in to work, and they’re like “Jake, I have plumber’s block,” you know? What would your boss say?! I have teacher’s block. I have accounting block. They would say “You are fired! You have problems and you are fired. Get your ass in here and plumb some stuff, Jerry!”

PATRICK ROTHFUSS

Material

When I was in college, I took a writing course that required each student to turn in a one-page vignette every day of the week, except Saturday and Sunday. It was common for a student’s confidence to swell as he tossed off the first week’s worth of stories—as I remember, we didn’t hear an instructor’s opinion of our work until a couple of weeks had passed—and then, on about Tuesday or Wednesday of the second week, to roll a piece of blank paper into the typewriter and come to the sudden and devastating realization that seven one-page vignettes had used up his life experience.

CALVIN TRILLIN

The Test Is Not Talent, but Purpose

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

REBECCA SOLNIT

Learn How to Be Interested in Other People

If you’re writing about people you have to be interested in people. What makes a question a good question? Well, I like, “Do your children shower?” or “Who’s the drunkest customer that you’ve had today?” I met this woman one time and I said, “When was the last time you touched a monkey?” And she said, “Oh, can you smell it on me?” That’s the kind of moment you can create when you learn how to be really interested in other people and how to observe the world around you.

DAVID SEDARIS

The Narrative Essay

Poetry seems to have priced itself out of a job; sadly, it often handles few materials of significance and addresses a tiny audience. Literary fiction is scarcely published; it’s getting to be like conceptual art — all the unknown writer can do is tell people about his work, and all they can say is, “good idea.” The short story is to some extent going the way of poetry, willfully limiting its subject matter to such narrow surfaces that it cannot address the things that most engage our hearts and minds. So the narrative essay may become the genre of choice for writers devoted to significant literature.

ANNIE DILLARD

A Really Good First Line

A book won’t stand or fall on the very first line of prose – the story has got to be there, and that’s the real work. And yet a really good first line can do so much to establish that crucial sense of voice -- it’s the first thing that acquaints you, that makes you eager, that starts to enlist you for the long haul. So there’s incredible power in it, when you say, come in here. You want to know about this. And someone begins to listen.

STEPHEN KING