Write, Write, Write

Years ago, when I was in college, at Stanford — and starting to figure out that I wanted to be a writer — some friends and I got to take a creative-writing class with the writer Tobias Wolff, who had taught for years at Stanford and, before that, at Syracuse (where George Saunders was his student). Toward the end of the quarter, he did a kind of Q&A session, and I asked him what differentiated the writers he’d worked with who had gone on to publish books from those who hadn’t. His answer struck me, at the time, as completely unsatisfying: the ones who published books, he said, were the ones who just kept working on it, long after everyone else had given up. Write, write, write. There’s not much magic to it, but, eventually, it works.

VAUHINI VARA

A Movie Is Not a Book

This is the immutable law of the business: The only screenplays that aren’t tampered with are the ones that aren’t made. A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. Everything else — just tear that motherfucker apart.

RICHARD PRICE

Go All the Way

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Have a Nap

A nap clears the head wonderfully, besides giving fresh energy. I realize that about half the people of the world cannot nap without feeling logy afterward, but for those who can, a nap is a time-saver, not a time-waster. In my twenties, I had to do my own writing in the evenings, as my days were taken up with jobs or hack work. I got into the habit of napping around six, or of being able to if I wished, and of bathing and changing my clothes. This gave me an illusion of two days in one and made me as fresh for the evening, under the circumstances, as I could possibly be. Problems in writing can come unknotted in a miraculous way after a nap. I go to sleep with the problem, and wake up with the answer.

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

Let Fate and Posterity Be Your Judges

Let fate and posterity be your judges. Ignore the market. Ignore the bestseller lists. Ignore the prize nominations, or lack of them. Ignore any friends or contemporaries who are making more money than you while you toil away in your garret. All of this is easier said than done; try to do it nonetheless. You have a star to follow. Don’t be distracted from it by the rise and fall of fashions or fortunes, including your own. You have no idea how valuable your work is, and you probably never will. What you can be sure of is that true value is not to be measured in either sales figures or notoriety.

PAUL KINGSNORTH

A Novel Is Like a Party

When I’m writing novels, reality and unreality just naturally get mixed together. It’s not as if that was my plan and I’m following it as I write, but the more I try to write about reality in a realistic way, the more the unreal world invariably emerges. For me, a novel is like a party. Anybody who wants to join in can join in, and those who wish to leave can do so whenever they want.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

What Culture Wants

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.

UMBERTO ECO

Writing Should Be Exploratory

Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing you thought you wanted to express. And as you work, other kinds of meaning emerge than what you might have expected. It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Writing a Novel Is Like Making a Movie

Writing a novel is like making a movie: All sorts of accidental things will happen after you’ve set up the cameras. So you get lucky. Something will happen at the edge of the set and perhaps you go with that. You come into it accidentally. You set the story in motion, and as you’re watching this thing begin, all these opportunities will show up. So in order to exploit one thing or another, you may have to do research. You may have to find out more about Chinese immigrants, or you may have to find out about Halley’s Comet, or whatever, where you didn’t realize that you were going to have Chinese or Halley’s Comet in the story. So you do research on that, and it implies more, and the deeper you get into the story, the more  it implies, the more suggestions it make on the plot. Toward the end, the ending becomes inevitable.

KURT VONNEGUT

Just Type Something

Just type something. Then delete it, because it’s terrible. Type something else. Rearrange the words. Add festive punctuation. Then delete that, and start again. Eventually, something will start to seem right. (It’s like Michelangelo chipping away at a block of marble, only instead of marble you have a computer screen and instead of a chisel you have a stress headache. On the plus side, you, at least, have a flush toilet.)

UNA LaMARCHE