Funny Thing About Words

Funny thing about words. Regarded individually or encountered in newspapers or books (written by other people), they are as lovely and blameless as talcum-sweet babies. String them together into a sentence of your own, however, and these cooing infants become a savage gang straight out of Lord of the Flies. A sullen coven with neither conscience nor allegiance. It will take the civilizing influence of repeated revision to whip them into shape, an exhausting prospect.

DAVID RAKOFF

See Enough and Write It Down

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.

JOAN DIDION

Memoirists Must Show and Tell

Memoir is the intersection of narration and reflection, of storytelling and essay writing. It can present its story and consider the meaning of the story. The first commandment of fiction—Show, Don’t Tell—is not part of the memoirist’s faith. Memoirists must show and tell.

PATRICIA HAMPL

Write About Things that Surprise You

Writing should be pleasurable, it should be fun, it should be exploratory. You should be writing about things that surprise you. That is the instinct for all kinds of art. All you need to do, really, is to take that instinct and transform it into craft.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Five Common Traits of Good Writers

(1) They have something to say.

(2) They read widely and have done so since childhood.

(3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a “capacity for clear thought,” able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach.

(4) They’re geniuses at putting their emotions into words.

(5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.

JAMES J. KILPATRICK

A Story Is a Black Box

My go-to model for my stories – a model that actually helps me write them – is that a story is a black box, into which the reader goes, and something happens. Something big and breathtaking and non-trivial. I don’t have to know what that thing is beforehand – it’s going to reveal itself to me at speed and I don’t need to be able to pithily reduce it. I just have to micro-manage the machinery inside the box so as to maximize the various effects – to sharpen the curves, so to speak. Now, mysteriously, thinking of stories this way does tend to produce themes and ethical resonance and all of that – how, I don’t know. But I’m OK with not knowing. I just want to get better at the doing.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

Do Not Puzzle Your Reader Unnecessarily

Do not try to puzzle your reader unnecessarily; a puzzled reader is an antagonistic reader. Do not expect him to guess why a character does something or how it happens that some remark is made; it may be that you want him to stop and wonder for a minute; if so, make it perfectly clear that everything is going to be all right later on.

SHIRLEY JACKSON

This Is Sacred Work

Figuring out what the public wants, or even what the public is: that's the job of pollsters and publicists and advertisers. All those people study the marketplace. But the creative artist can change the world. A true writer opens people's ears and eyes, not merely playing to the public, but changing minds and lives. This is sacred work.

ALLEGRA GOODMAN

Cut Like Crazy

Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts–including my own–where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.

SARAH WATERS

Writing Is Linear and Sequential

Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?”

WILLIAM ZINSSER