I don’t think writers should be worried about treading any lines between autobiography and fiction. You should write whatever you want to write. Once you label it fiction, it’s fiction, even if you give the protagonist a feeling you’ve felt, or your same hometown. All fiction is born out of some alchemy of observation, imagination, and personal experience.
RACHEL KHONG
Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
REBECCA SOLNIT
I can count on one hand, or possibly one elbow, the number of good writing ideas I’ve had while straining at the keyboard. When you find yourself stumped, when a character seems to want to do this but the story seems to demand that she do that, it’s time to go for a walk. The answer will pop up into your mind so unexpectedly that you will very likely not be carrying a pen.
BEN DOLNICK
Leave home. Because if you stay home people will ask you questions that you can't answer. They say, "What are you going to write? Where will you publish it? Who's going to pay you? How will you make a living?" If you leave home, no one asks you questions like that.
PAUL THEROUX
The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth, that is what it means to be a writer.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
I think a writer’s voice is really his or her authentic, natural voice—the way she actually expresses herself and sees the world. But it takes time to get to that. I think the first many years of writing you tend to write the way you think you’re supposed to sound, and gradually (if you’re lucky) you begin dropping that affect and getting to what is your true voice. In time, you come to know that voice well enough that you know how to emphasize it, enrich it.
SUSAN ORLEAN
Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.
DAVID SHIELDS
Short fiction is a special, very different discipline, often requiring at least as much skill and effort as novel-writing. And while it’s relatively easy to get away with a certain amount of bagginess and loose plotting when you’re writing a novel, those things become quickly and mercilessly apparent if you’re writing a short story.
JOANNE HARRIS
You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft. You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it ... but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
STEPHEN KING
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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