Fooled by Stories

I don’t begin with a preconceived notion of where a piece of writing is going to end. If you go around filling a grocery cart, you figure, I’m cooking for tonight. You are not often fooled in the grocery store as to what your approach should be. But I’m fooled by stories sometimes, thinking that I’m picking up something for the night, and it turns out that I’m shopping for a week or a month. I’m always happy when that happens. It’s not consistent fun like being on a roller coaster, but I can hardly think of anything that pleases me more than writing a sentence that surprises me.

ANN BEATTIE

Like Learning an Instrument

You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that’s just the way it is. It’s like learning an instrument, you’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot, cause I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with.

J.K. ROWLING

Dip Up the Fire

I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrous. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

HARLAN ELLISON

Plot Is an Organic Thing

Most writers think up a plot with an intriguing situation and then proceed to fit characters into it. With me a plot, if you could call it that, is an organic thing. It grows and often it overgrows. I am continually finding myself with scenes that I won’t discard and that don’t want to fit in. So that my plot problem invariably ends up as a desperate attempt to justify a lot of material that, for me at least, has come alive and insists on staying alive. It’s probably a silly way to write, but I seem to know no other way. The mere idea of being committed in advance to a certain pattern appalls me.

RAYMOND CHANDLER

Write to Think

I think I write to think—not to find out what I think; surely I know what I already think—but to do better thinking. Staring at my laptop screen makes me better at thinking. Even thinking about writing makes me better at thinking. And when I’m thinking well, I can sometimes write that rare, rare sentence or paragraph that feels exactly right, only in the sense that I found the exact right sequence of words and punctuation to express my own thought—the grammar in the thought. That rightness feels so good, like sinking an unlikely shot in pool. The ball is away and apart from you, but you feel it in your body, the knowledge of causation. Never mind luck or skill or free will, you caused that effect—you’re alive!

ELISA GABBERT

Stories Are Compasses and Architecture

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

REBECCA SOLNIT

Writing Is 90 Percent Procrastination

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

PAUL RUDNICK

Art Is the Daughter of Time

Art is the daughter of time, which means basically you write for the people who can read you when you and they are alive. I’m perfectly comfortable with that. The whole notion of legacy — I think it’s kind of a media creation in a sense. We all talk about people’s legacies. I just don’t think about it. I feel like it’s a privilege to get to write books. I feel like it’s a high calling. I feel like it’s allowed me to take full advantage of myself, with the chaos that goes on in my brain. If somebody reads me now, when I publish these books and write these books, that’s all I ask. That’s really all I ask.

RICHARD FORD

Every Young Writer Is Different

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, “Read,” but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, “Don’t read, don’t think, just write,” and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you’re going to be a writer you’ll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, “There must be something else people do,” you won’t quite be able to quit.

ALICE MUNRO

It's Your Book

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