The Best Writing Advice

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from Dwight Macdonald: “Everything about the same subject in the same place.”

JAMES ATLAS

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is, “Knock ‘em dead with that lead sentence.”

WHITNEY BALLIETT

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was probably something Ted Solotaroff told me years ago when he was my editor. Going over a manuscript line by line again and again he kept reminding me, “Remember, this is your book, not my book. You’re the one who’s going to have to live with it the rest of your life. I might publish 30 or 40 books this year, you’re only going to publish one, and probably the only one you’re going to publish in two or three years.”

RUSSELL BANKS

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from William Zinsser: “Be grateful for every word you can cut.”

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

Best writing advice I’ve ever received: Sell everything three times.

MARGARET CARLSON

Best advice I ever got was from the Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu, who told me in Bucharest, before I emigrated: "Learn English. French is dead."

ANDREI CODRESCU

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received: “Don’t have children.” I gave it to myself.

RICHARD FORD

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: Don’t answer the phone.

PATSY GARLAN

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.

DAVID GUTERSON

The best writing advice I’ve ever heard: Don't write like you went to college.

ALICE KAHN

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was, “Rewrite it!” A lot of editors said that. They were all right. Writing is really rewriting--making the story better, clearer, truer.

ROBERT LIPSYTE

Best advice on writing I’ve ever received: Finish.

PETER MAYLE

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: “Write with authority.

CYNTHIA OZICK

I think the best advice on writing I've received was from John Steinbeck, who suggested that one way to get around writer's block (which I was suffering hideously at the time) was to pretend to be writing to an aunt, or a girl friend. I did this, writing to an actress friend I knew, Jean Seberg. The editors of Harpers forgot to take off the salutation and that's how the article begins in the magazine: Dear Jean....

GEORGE PLIMPTON

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was given to me, like so much else, by Hubert Selby, Jr.: to learn and to know that writing is not an act of the self, except perhaps as exorcism; that, in writing what is worth being written, one serves, as vessel and voice, a power greater than vessel and voice.

NICK TOSCHES

Competence Is Deadly

To go from being a competent writer to being a great writer, I think you have to risk being – or risk being seen as – a bad writer. Competence is deadly because it prevents the writer risking the humiliation that they will need to risk before they pass beyond competence. To write competently is to do a few magic tricks for friends and family; to write well is to run away to join the circus. Your friends and family will love your tricks, because they love you. But try busking those tricks on the street. Try busking them alongside a magician who has been doing it for 10 years, earning their living. When they are watching a magician, people don’t want to say, “Well done.” They want to say, “Wow.”

TOBY LITT

Forgiveness Is Key

Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

ANN PATCHETT

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