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
Art is not just our expression of life and of ourselves. It is not just our internal cry: Art is the lie we need about the world and ourselves. When we write or paint or act or compose, we are imposing an order, yes, but we are also crafting a world we can control, and usually it is one we can admire--or at the very least recognize. Art is not elite; art is not on a high shelf for a chosen few. Art is, like religion, a primary narcotic.
MARLON BRANDO
One of my favorite pieces of writing advice [is] from Aristotle’s Poetics: “Action is not plot,” wrote Aristotle, “but merely the result of pathos.” This is not just advice about writing, but about life itself, the whole megillah, the human catastrophe. If you have people, you will have pathos. We are incited by our feelings — by the love, rage, envy, sorrow, joy, longing, fear, passion — that lead us to action. Plot is really just a fancy word for whatever happens, and structure is a fancy word for how it happens. Plot can be as intricate as a whodunit, or as simple as a character experiencing a small but significant shift in perspective. But invariably it comes from the people we create on the page.
DANI SHAPIRO
There is a kind of central truth and if you get the central truth, and the motion of people, then the rest is implied. Henry James talks about this in The Art of Fiction. He writes about a woman writer he knew who ran up the stairs of a little French house in Paris, and on her way up she passed a room with a door open and inside there was a meeting going on of French Huguenots—this was in the nineteenth century—and they were smoking cigarettes and talking. She was only there for half a minute; she paused and then she went on. Two or three years later she wrote a book about the Huguenots, and everything in it, as Henry James said, was absolutely true. She just went from that one moment. Now, I was very careful not to tell my students to only write about what you know, because I couldn’t define what they knew. That’s where the question really begins. How to define what you know. And what she knew and sensed in that second was everything.
PAULA FOX
Trollope said, “On the last day of each month recorded, every person in a work of fiction should be a month older than on the first.” We go with our characters wherever they lead us, and as time makes its mark on us, so it must on them.
HALLIE BURNETT
The more I read, and write, the more convinced I am that writing has less to do with acquired technique than with inner conviction. The assurance that you have something to say that the world needs to hear counts for more than literary skill. Those writers who hold their readers’ attention are the ones who grab them by the lapel and say, “You’ve got to listen to what I am about to tell you.” It’s hard to be passionate. It means you must put your whole poke on the table. Yet this very go-for-broke quality grabs and holds a reader far more surely than any mastery of technique.
RALPH KEYS
A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It’s what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it’s also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though the nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.
ANDRÉ ACIMAN
I read a lot of science fiction as a kid. And, of course, that meant reading boys books because that's what kids' science fiction was. I made up my own stories to put myself in them. I wound up writing science fiction from the point of view of girls and women, just because I was a girl and I am a woman. I wound up writing science fiction from the point of view of Black people because I am Black. But I've also explored and I, in a strange sense, I suppose, found out what it might be like to be a white male or whatever. One of the things writing does is, is allow you to be other people without actually being locked up for it.
OCTAVIA BUTLER
You can pick up a volume of Chekhov’s stories and open it anywhere, and, no matter how well or poorly the Russian has been translated, you will probably have a hard time finding a sentence you can’t understand. This is because, as much as any other writer and more than most, Chekhov put such a premium on writing comprehensibly, without flowery language or unnecessary adornment.
FRANCINE PROSE
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
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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