The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
T.S. ELIOT
Make up a story.... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.
TONI MORRISON
Dreaming and writing are Adam and Eve of the same process. Long before one ever writes a story…one works a story. You have ideas; and they stay there in your barely conscious mind; and you work them over. You masticate them like a puppy with a Christmas slipper until—finally—out comes a story. A significant part of that birthing process is informed by the dreaming. So the dreaming and the writing: elements of the same manufacture.
HARLAN ELLISON
There are certain ways of becoming attentive. Like walking. If I go for a long walk, I can think better because I don’t have to worry about what I’m doing. But sometimes you can walk for three hours and it’s only just as you’re putting the supper in the oven that you realize exactly what the answer is.
MARGARET DRABBLE
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
Don’t include camera angles or other technical directions [in your screenplay]. Those are the director’s or editor’s or D.P.’s jobs. No CLOSE SHOT, PAN, ZOOM IN, or any of the dozens of others you happen to know…unless there is a rare occasion when it is absolutely necessary for a story point. In fact, the direction CUT TO is a waste of space on the page and generally a redundancy: How do you usually get from one scene to another if not by cutting to it? (Yeah, I know: dissolve, wipe, flip, fade, etc. Don’t write any of them.) No references to other movies. And no music; especially no lyrics. That’s why they invented composers and music supervisors.
TONY BILL
It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda, whether it be the Sistine Chapel or La Gioconda, Madame Bovary or War and Peace. The moment the novelist begins to show how society affected the lives of his characters, how they were formed and shaped by the sprawling inchoate world in which they lived, he is writing a novel of social criticism whether he calls it that or not.
ANN PETRY
Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
One way to use coincidence and make it work is to have nothing turn on it. Coincidences feel illegitimate when they solve problems. If the story doesn’t benefit from the coincidence, it’s simply pretty and suggestive. Another way to make a coincidence work is to begin a story with it. Make it the reason there’s a story to tell in the first place. A third is to establish that the community in which your story takes place is one in which coincidence is part of the landscape. People in my town, New Haven, Connecticut, revel in coincidence, and we claim it happens here all the time: you know everyone in more than one way. Maybe this is true in all cities of a certain size—small enough that the barista will turn out to be your office mate’s daughter; large enough that you’ll be surprised.
ALICE MATTISON
Many writers can’t make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don’t really know about its value to the student. I don’t mean it’s useless. But I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to teach me how to write. That’s my own taste. I prefer to stumble on it. I prefer to go on trying all kinds of things, not to be told, This is the way it is done.
CHINUA ACHEBE
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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