The Writer's Signature

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications. It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

RAYMOND CARVER

LET IT GO!

My advice is just write: write, write, write...but just as important: know when to let go. You must let go in order to move forward. Again and again I see young writers I admire getting stuck on one book. They try to get it published and nobody wants it and they go back and tweak it again and again for years without getting into something new. My advice is, "LET IT GO!" Stick it in a drawer, move on. Trust me, you will get better just by virtue of experience, and if you turn out to be Ernest Hemingway twenty years down the line, they'll ask you what you have stored away in that drawer of yours.

COLIN BRODERICK

A Writer's Life

Whenever I'm gathered with a group of people over 40 now, we just kind of sit and stare into space and say things like, “What is this life?” And I think that probably comes to everyone…. I have no idea what's going on most of the time. I can't handle life at all. But when I'm writing, it's a controlled area, and I can think things through a bit more calmly, think through ideas, feelings, sort them. But in the life, no. I'm like a merchant of chaos. I don't know what's happening. I don't know which way is up. I'm terrified of the future. I worry about everything. I'm just another citizen caught up in it. So the people you really need to admire, the people who are in the world facing everything we're facing and yet able to really function, get out there, do grassroots action, act, keep acting, make decisions. I am not that person. I know I'm not. I'm a writer. It's a very reduced role. And I enjoy it, and I love to do it. But it's not to be confused with people who are really able to act in the world in a positive way for others.

ZADIE SMITH

Listen to Yourself

I think the best advice I’ve learned from life is to listen to yourself, not to others. Stick to what you have, not to what you want to have or wish you had. Stay close to yourself, to your inner voice and vision and how you want the writing to be. When my first novel was published it got lots of bad reviews, and they haunted me, and if I had listened to them I would have stopped writing. I decided to listen to myself instead—to what I knew. Ever since then that has been a kind of rule for me.

Of course this goes both ways. For some years now my writing has been well received, and I’ve received many awards and so on, but I try to not let it influence my writing in any way. Good reaction or bad reaction: it doesn’t matter, I stick to what I know, what I feel I need to write, what I can do and not what I want to do. For example, my plays were a great success but I decided to stop writing plays, and I stopped for many years.

JON FOSSE

Don't Judge Your Characters

I’ve always believed…that you never want to judge or condemn your characters on the page. Instead you want to reveal what they do in direct light and allow readers to come to their own conclusion. Literature isn’t about presenting a moral condemnation—rather exploring the complex feelings of human life.

ANNIE DeWITT

The Essence of Fiction Writing

The difficulty is that we create protagonists we love. And we love them like our children. We want to protect them from harm, keep them safe, make sure they won’t get hurt, or not so bad. Maybe a skinned knee. Certainly not a car wreck. But the essence of fiction writing is creating a character you love and, frankly, torturing him. You are both sadist and savior. Find the thing he loves most and take it away from him. Find the thing he fears and shove him shoulder deep into it. Find the person who is absolutely worst for him and have him delivered into that character’s hands. Having him make a choice which is absolutely wrong. You’ll find the story will take on an energy of its own, like a wound-up spring, and then you’ll just have to follow it, like a fox hunt, over hill, over dale.

JANET FITCH

It's Baseball, Not Football

It’s baseball, not football—a long season, slumps, errors, humiliations, bad feelings, bad weather, jet lag, all that stuff, and you just grind it out. You believe that in the end, the numbers (whatever they would be in our business) will show that except for that O-for-31 in May, you had a pretty good season.

STEPHEN HUNTER

Writers Need to Read

I believe so strongly that writers need to read, and that reading is the way you can prevent writer’s block or get over writer’s block. You can’t keep writing if you’re not filling your gas tank with whatever you want to read. So I’m sure that as I keep reading narratives, they’ll keep speaking to me in their own ways, and I’ll be turning back out stories that have been flavored by whatever I’ve been reading.

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

Gardeners and Architects

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN

Keep the Soup Boiling

I am anti-entropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrator or critic with umbrage will say of my work, “He only wrote that to shock.” I smile and nod. Precisely.

HARLAN ELLISON