We Must Not Be Defeated

There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats—maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats—but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. 

MAYA ANGELOU

Free-Fall

So I’ve learned over the years to free-fall into what’s happening. What happens then is, you start writing something you don’t even really want to write about. Things start to happen under your pencil that you don’t want to happen, or don’t understand. But that’s when the work starts to have a beating heart.

ANDRE DUBUS III

Computers Are God's Gift to Writers

To the extent that I begin with notes, I still begin everything by hand (the notes are short, but the hand is long). I move fairly quickly to the computer now and store notes there. As for typewriters, I haven’t used one in years, although I wrote my first three books that way. Very time-consuming. I used to believe that everything should be written out first before being subjected to a keyboard of any sort. One needed to feel the words coming down out of your arm, out your fingers and onto the paper. Then I felt one should do it all again percussively to the clackety-clack sound of a typewriter. But as for revising, well, computers really are God’s gift to writers. It took me a long time to accept even the possibility of that.

LORRIE MOORE

Story Writers Leave Stuff Out

Short stories are more like poems than like novels. Novelists put stuff in, because they are trying to represent a world. Story writers, as Poe implied, leave stuff out. They are not trying to represent a world. They are trying to express a single, intangible thing. The story writer begins with an idea about what readers will feel when they finish reading, just as a lyric poet starts with a nonverbal state of mind and then constructs a verbal artifact that evokes it. The endings of modern short stories tend to be oblique, but they, too, are structured for an effect, frequently of pathos.

LOUIS MENAND

Characters Emerge from the Flow of the Story

Most of the time, the characters who appear in my novels naturally emerge from the flow of the story. I almost never decide in advance that I’ll present a particular type of character. As I write, a kind of axis forms that makes possible the appearance of certain characters, and I go ahead and fit one detail after another into place, like iron scraps attaching to a magnet. And in this way an overall picture of a person materializes. Afterward I often think that certain details resemble those of a real person, but most of the process happens automatically. I think I almost unconsciously pull information and various fragments from the cabinets in my brain and then weave them together.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Writing Must Be a Selfish Act

I believe that many successful writers do write keeping the reader in mind from the beginning, and this is very dangerous. When I first started talking about this project of mine, a few years ago, many told me: “Don’t do this, this is a misstep, you don’t have to, don’t.” And I’m not talking about Italian writers: most of them were American writers. I asked them: Why, why can’t I? I didn’t understand this preconception. And they said “The reader doesn’t need this experiment.” Well, I don’t agree, because I think that writing must also be a selfish act. A book might reach out to someone else at some point, after years, or maybe never at all, but it is not up to me to write with this idea in mind. Writing is, above all, an internal dialogue.

JHUMPA LAHIRI

A Passion for the Work

The choice to train to be an artist of any kind is a risky one. Art’s a vocation, and often pays little for years and years — or never. Kids who want to be dancers, musicians, painters, writers, need more than dreams. They need a serious commitment to learning how to do what they want to do, and working at it through failure and discouragement. Dreams are lovely, but passion is what an artist needs — a passion for the work. That’s all that can carry you through the hard times. So I guess my advice to the young writer is a warning, and a wish: You’ve chosen a really, really hard job that probably won’t pay you beans — so get yourself some kind of salable skill to live on! And may you find the reward of your work in the work itself. — May it bring you joy.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Two Grandmothers

I had two grandmothers, and both were storytellers. One was from Vera Cruz, on the gulf coast; the other one was from Mazatlán in Sinaloa on the Pacific Coast. So I had two oceans at my disposal. I spent my summers with my grannies in Mexico. My father was counselor of the Mexican Embassy in Washington at the time. I think that I became a writer because I heard those stories -- all the stories that I didn’t know about Mexico, about my own land. They were the storehouse of these great tales of migrants, revolution, highway robberies, bandits, love affairs, ways of dressing, eating -- they had the whole storehouse of the past in their heads and their hearts. So this was, for me, very fascinating, this relationship with my two grannies -- the two authors of my books really.

CARLOS FUENTES

Trusted Collaborators

I really like having a community of trusted collaborators who can help me figure out very early whether material is alive and whether I’m making any egregious mistakes. There is tremendous solitude around writing, and I like that. Most people who write seriously tend to be pretty solitary people. But that does not mean that I can work in isolation and know if what I’m doing is good. I need a community to help me understand what’s working and what isn’t, and I really encourage people to try to find that.

JENNIFER EGAN

Artists Are Here to Disturb the Peace

Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened a hundred years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos.

JAMES BALDWIN