Nobody wants to read a book. You’ve got to catch their eye with something exciting in the first paragraph, while they’re in the process of throwing the book away. If it’s exciting enough, they’ll stop and read it. Then you’ve got to put something even more exciting in the second paragraph, to suck them in further. And so on. It’s exhausting for everybody, but it’s got to be done.
JOHN SWARTZWELDER
Don’t bludgeon us over the head with description. A line or three about the character is good enough—and it doesn’t need to be purely about their physical looks. It can be about movement and body language. It can be about what people think, about what goes on in her head. But throw out a couple-few lines and get out. Dialogue is where a character is revealed. And action. What a character says and does is the sum of her being. It doesn’t need to be more than that: a character says shit, then does shit, then says shit about the shit she just did. In there lurks infinite possibilities—a confluence of atoms that reveals who she is.
CHUCK WENDIG
When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself. And while I’m doing it, I really have the feeling that this time, at the end of it, I will be other than myself. Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I’m just the same. I’m always disappointed that I’m just the same, but not enough to never do it again! I get right back up and I start something else, and I think this time — this time — I really will be transformed into something other than this tawdry, ordinary thing, sitting on the bed and drinking cold coffee. When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I’m finished.
JAMAICA KINCAID
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
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
Copyright © Jon Winokur 2019-2025. All rights reserved. Website by Wei-Haas Creative.
The trademark AdviceToWriters® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.