We, and I think I’m speaking for many writers, don’t know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is to write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don’t think that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn’t work that way. When the magic comes, it’s a gift.
MADELEINE L’ENGLE
Fine writing does not necessarily make a fine novel; you have concentrated so much on your undoubted skill at manipulating the English language you have forgotten the need for a developing story, a satisfactory beginning, middle and end. You have lost your reader in a welter of remarkable similes and striking metaphors. Readers are quick to pick up whether you are trying to communicate with them to the best of your skill and ability, or just showing off. The very density of fine writing can be off-putting — it’s exhausting. If you’re going to do it, at least put in lots of paragraphs.
FAY WELDON
Never mind what it means. Get it down. Get it written. Perhaps you do not know what it means. Let others tell you what it means to them. It is your story; it is all you have. Tell it. Write it down. It is suicidal to contemplate your meaning, your theme, your reason for being before a single jot is on a page. Get it on the page, and then you can play with it; revise it; sculpt it; abort it. But get it done. There is an awful lot of not getting it done going on right now.
HAROLD PINTER
I’m never writing autobiography—I would be bored, the reader would be bored, the writing would be nowhere. One has to imagine, one has to create (exaggerate, lie, fabricate from whole cloth and patch together from remnants), or the thing will not come alive as art. Of course, what one is interested in writing about often comes from what one has remarked in one’s immediate world or what one has experienced oneself or perhaps what one’s friends have experienced. But one takes these observations, feelings, memories, anecdotes—whatever—and goes on an imaginative journey with them.
LORRIE MOORE
The most important thing is confidence. You have to believe you have the ability to tell the story, to strike the vein of water, to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Without that confidence, you can’t go anywhere. It’s like boxing. Once you climb into the ring, you can’t back out. You have to fight until the match is over.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
One of a ghostwriter’s main jobs is having a big mouth. You win some, you lose most, but you have to keep pushing, not unlike a demanding parent or a tyrannical coach. Otherwise, you’re nothing but a glorified stenographer, and that’s disloyalty to the author, to the book—to books. Opposition is true Friendship, William Blake wrote, and if I had to choose a ghostwriting credo, that would be it.
J. R. MOEHRINGER
Writers hate formulas and checklists. It’s way more fun to masquerade as a natural shaman who channels beautiful pages as the oracle once channeled Zeus. But looking at my own books, I’ve found they all include most of the stuff below—as do most of the books I teach. Here’s my list:
1. Paint a physical reality that uses all the senses and exists in the time you’re writing about—a singular, fascinating place peopled with objects and characters we believe in. Should include the speaker’s body or some kinesthetic elements.
2. Tell a story that gives the reader some idea of your milieu and exploits your talent. We remember in stories, and for a writer, story is where you start.
3. Package information about your present self or backstory so it has emotional conflict or scene.
All the rest of these are interior:
4. Set emotional stakes—why is the writer passionate about or desperate to deal with the past—the hint of an inner enemy?
5. Think, figure, wonder, guess. Show yourself weighing what’s true, your fantasies, values, schemes, and failures.
6. Change times back and forth—early on, establish the “looking back” voice, and the “being in it” voice.
7. Collude with the reader about your relationship with the truth and memory.
8. Show not so much how you suffer in long passages, but how you survive. Use humor or an interjecting adult voice to help a reader over the dark places.
9. Don’t exaggerate. Trust that what you felt deeply is valid.
10. Watch your blind spots—in revision, if not before, search for reversals. Beware of what you avoid and what you cling to.
11. (Related to all of the above) Love your characters. Ask yourself what underlay their acts and versions of the past. Sometimes I pray to see people I’m angry at or resentful of as God sees them, which heals both page and heart.
And one big fat caveat: lead with your own talent, which may cause you to ignore all I’ve recommended.
MARY KARR, The Art of Memoir
Certain things in movies I watched while growing up began to strike me as increasingly unreal. For instance: I’d never been in New York, but I found it unlikely that you could pull up in front of the Waldorf-Astoria at any hour of the day or night and find a parking space; I would get faintly indignant that no one waited for change when they paid a check in a restaurant; I found it hard to swallow that every married couple slept in twin beds, that the husband always wore pajamas, and the wife always woke up without her lipstick smeared; I knew it was a flat-out lie when the movie was set in Los Angeles and the men wore hats and overcoats. The misrepresentation of native dress was a serious violation of reality. It rankled me the way James Fenimore Cooper’s Indians rankled Mark Twain— when six of them jump out of a sapling barely six feet tall and somehow miss a barge 150 feet long passing beneath them at less than one mile an hour. Moreover, these hats in L.A. weren’t merely noted on the printed page; they were being shown on a huge screen, the offending item much larger than life. I’m sure I figured somewhere back then that sooner or later, when I grew up, I would try and do it differently. I’d make it “real.” Particularly because I grew up in a place outsiders claimed was unreal, and because I looked at representations of that world onscreen that I thought were unreal, I suppose I saw movies as a way of redressing a wrong. I would use one illusion— movies— in order to make another illusion—Los Angeles—real.
ROBERT TOWNE
Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a different language than they'd use if they were talking to a friend. The sentence structure and even the words are different. No one uses "pen" as a verb in spoken English. You'd feel like an idiot using "pen" instead of "write" in a conversation with a friend.
PAUL GRAHAM
Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story: first, he said, throw out the first three pages. As a young writer I figured that if anybody knew about short stories, it was Chekhov, so I tried taking his advice. I really hoped he was wrong, but of course he was right. It depends on the length of the story, naturally; if it’s very short, you can only throw out the first three paragraphs. But there are few first drafts to which Chekhov’s Razor doesn’t apply. Starting a story, we all tend to circle around, explain a lot of stuff, set things up that don’t need to be set up. Then we find our way and get going, and the story begins…very often just about on page three.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
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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