Follow Your Curiosity and Passion

My own best advice is to young writers is: follow your curiosity and passion. What fascinates you will probably fascinate others. But, even if it doesn't, you will have devoted your life to what you love. An important corollary is that it's no use trying to write like someone else. Discover what's uniquely yours.

DIANE ACKERMAN

Write in Spoken Language

Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a different language than they'd use if they were talking to a friend. The sentence structure and even the words are different. No one uses "pen" as a verb in spoken English. You'd feel like an idiot using "pen" instead of "write" in a conversation with a friend.

PAUL GRAHAM

Let Loose

At a certain point, you have to be kind to yourself as a writer and trust your own motives. You have to have confidence that you’re coming from the right place. You have to allow yourself to let loose, pursue a good story, and create people who feel real. Not good, not bad, certainly not perfect—just real.

ANGELA FLOURNOY

You Never Know Who Your Readers Might Be

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Be Faithful to Your Perceptions

It’s not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don’t take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you’re trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There’s no objective reason why they’re right. They just sound right to me.

MARTIN AMIS

Put a Bomb Under the Bed

My policy is to begin a story as late as possible, using flashback. But if you can open with, “He reached out for Steve’s throat,” and then pull back for the dispute, about why we were arguing. Hitchcock said, “You put the bomb under the bed.” You know that story?

“Mr. Hitchcock, how long do you hold a kiss on the screen?” some idiot student asked him a question at a film school. Hitchcock said, “Oh, I would say twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

“That’s a helluva long kiss, Mr. Hitchcock.”

“Yes, but first of all I would put a bomb under the bed.”

JOHN le CARRÉ

Don't Overwrite

Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced.

SARAH WATERS

Avoid Ambition

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

CYNTHIA OZICK

A Loud Color

In Spanish as well as English you speak of a “loud color.” A “loud color” is a common phrase, but then the things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

Find Your Reward in the Work Itself

The choice to train to be an artist of any kind is a risky one. Art’s a vocation, and often pays little for years and years — or never. Kids who want to be dancers, musicians, painters, writers, need more than dreams. They need a serious commitment to learning how to do what they want to do, and working at it through failure and discouragement. Dreams are lovely, but passion is what an artist needs — a passion for the work. That’s all that can carry you through the hard times. So I guess my advice to the young writer is a warning, and a wish: You’ve chosen a really, really hard job that probably won’t pay you beans — so get yourself some kind of salable skill to live on! And may you find the reward of your work in the work itself. May it bring you joy.

URSULA K. LE GUIN