Forgiveness Is Key

Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

ANN PATCHETT

Every Writer Is a Political Writer

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.

GEORGE ORWELL

A Writer Cares What Words Mean

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well, they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

URSULA LE GUIN

Keep It on the Body

I had a teacher who would say, “Keep it on the body.” For him that meant every sensation should stay tied to the corporeal experience, but also, at the sentence level, every metaphor, every simile should do so as well. This makes so much sense to me. Why compare something rust-colored to a brick when you could compare it to a spleen? Why put a plane in the sky when you could put a floater on the back of somebody’s eyeball? Doing it that way builds bodies and worlds simultaneously.

KIMBERLY KING PARSONS

Our Heroes Are Simple

Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

GRAHAM GREENE

Fiction Depends on Place

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else.... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?

EUDORA WELTY

The Form of the Novel Changes

Each novel I’ve written, any novel anyone writes, it’s not that you sit down saying “I believe this, and now I will write this,” but by the nature of your sentences, just by the things that you emphasize or that you don’t emphasize, you’re constantly expressing a belief about the way you think the world is, about the things that you think are important, and those things change. They do change. And the form of the novel changes as well. A very simple example is in a lot of my fiction I’ve delved very deeply into people’s heads, into their consciousness and tried to take out every detail, and the older I get and the more that I meet people and realize I don’t know them. My own husband is a stranger to me, really, fundamentally at the end you don’t know these people. That should be reflected in what you write, that total knowledge is impossible.

ZADIE SMITH

Flannery O'Connor's 10 Writing Tips

1. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

2. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

3. If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.

4. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

5. The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.

6. The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

7. The writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake. You want, of course, to get what you have to show across to him, but whether he likes it or not is no concern of the writer.

8. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don't sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won't be sitting there.

9. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

10. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.

Writing is Physical

Writing is physical. Thoreau said that over time an old poet learns to guard his or her moods as carefully as a cat watches a mouse. Hemingway advised writers to quit work each day with a bit of juice in the tank, knowing what would be coming the next day—a line of dialogue, a scene—so the writer could then slip more easily back into the dream of the story and not have to expend extra mental and physical energy—the sparks of friction—diving back down into the dream. He didn’t use those words—he compared the process instead to turning down the flame in a pilot lamp to the cool blue glow of just-waiting—but I like to think of it as a diving-down, a submersion, a re-immersion, into the subconscious: the wellspring of discovery, at which the traditional lens-shaped structure of the short story—six to eighteen pages—excels at delivering. 

RICK BASS

Show Don't Tell?

“Show, don’t tell,” it seems to me, is far too broad a rule even in fiction since a lot of great eighteenth, or nineteenth-century fiction certainly does show and tell. It’s a crude formulation, which has a greater truth in it. Of course if the teller has a wonderfully modulated voice and mind, I can see it in any method of telling. When Stendhal is on a roll, who cares if he’s showing or telling?

PHILLIP LOPATE