The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were.... All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.
SHIRLEY JACKSON
Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people’s conversation. One has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.
EVELYN WAUGH
Nothing can break the mood of a piece of writing like bad dialogue. My students are miserable when they are reading an otherwise terrific story to the class and then hit a patch of dialogue that is so purple and expositional that it reads like something from a childhood play by the Gabor sisters. ... I can see the surprise on my students' faces, because the dialogue looked okay on paper, yet now it sounds as if it were poorly translated from their native Hindi.
ANNE LAMOTT
[The] three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:
1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot.
2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.
3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
Readers, I think, are more sophisticated on the whole than critics. They can make the jumps, they can make imaginative leaps. If your structure is firm and solid enough, however strange, however unusual, they will be able to follow it. They will climb with you to the most unlikely places if they trust you, if the words give them the right footholds, the right handholds. That’s what I want my readers to do: I want them to come with me when we’re going mountain-climbing. This isn’t a walk through a theme park. This is some dangerous place that neither of us has been before, and I hope that by traveling there first, I can encourage the reader to come with me and that we will make the trip again together, and safely.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
There are, it seems, two kinds of editors. The first kind cares mainly about himself, about how his editing performance reflects on him and getting ahead or getting stroked or getting to lunch, as the case may be. Such editors are not editors at all and ought to go to breakfast and stay there. A real editor, however, is a rare thing, and I've been lucky in working with a few. A real editor is focused totally on the writer's work and helping the writer realize a vision of the piece or the book he's set out to do. Editing requires a certain selflessness that is hard to find.
DAVID REMNICK
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
NORA EPHRON
Metaphor is supposed to state the unknown in terms of the known. It is supposed to say X equals Y. Yet when we say “John is a lion,” we do not think of John with a mane, with four clawed paws, nor with a pompon tipped tail. We extract from “lion” the emotional equivalent we need and let the rest go. The real metaphoric formula is X does-and-does-not-equal Y.
JOHN CIARDI
Write. Start writing today. Start writing right now. Don’t write it right, just write it –and then make it right later. Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one. Be wary of “writing rules” and advice. Do it your way.
TARA MOSS
On the third or fourth draft, pencil in hand, I reread my test, by this point practically a fair copy, and eliminate whatever can be eliminated, whatever seems useless. Each deletion is a triumph. At the bottom of every page I write, “crossed out seven words,” “crossed out ten words,” as the case may be. It gives me great pleasure to get rid of what is futile.
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
Copyright © Jon Winokur 2019-2024. All rights reserved. Website by Wei-Haas Creative.
The trademark AdviceToWriters® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.