Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.
SARAH WATERS
I tell my students what I tell myself, write every day, even if it’s only a few lines, an image, a funny rhyme, a snatch of overheard conversation. All this is like chopped vegetables for the soup pot or witches cauldron of poems. And I tell them to read, read, read, and imitate the poems they love. I have tried to respond to every poem I’ve ever loved and it has served me well. Poetry is like church to me, and when I read a good poem it’s like the preacher calling out to the congregation, asking for a Hail Mary or a Hallelujah or Amen!
DORIANNE LAUX
That you can learn to write better is one of our fundamental assumptions. No sensible person would deny the mystery of talent, or for that matter the mystery of inspiration. But if it is vain to deny these mysteries, it is useless to depend on them. No other art form is so infinitely mutable. Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.
TRACY KIDDER
Do stories grow? Pretty obviously—anybody who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one person to another knows that they can grow, they can change. Can stories reproduce? Well, yes. Not spontaneously, obviously—they tend to need people as vectors. We are the media in which they reproduce; we are their petri dishes.
NEIL GAIMAN
Don't overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualised, but functional – like figures in a painting. Think of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, in which a patiently suffering Jesus is closely surrounded by four threatening men. Each of the characters is unique, and yet each represents a type; and collectively they form a narrative that is all the more powerful for being so tightly and so economically constructed.
SARAH WATERS
If I worked for a publication that did not use the serial comma, I would adjust -- convert from orthodox to reform -- but for now I remain loyal to the serial comma, because it actually does sometimes prevent ambiguity and because I've gotten used to the way it looks. It gives starch to the prose, and can be very effective. If a sentence were a picket fence, the serial commas would be posts at regular intervals.
MARY NORRIS
I want my students to tack up a Samuel Beckett quotation on their office doors: “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The ability to fail is what distinguishes the ordinary writer from the great one. The one who actually wants to push herself or himself so far that they know they’re going to crash and burn. You must risk yourself in order to find out what it is you truly know. That usually means just abandoning yourself to mystery. Over time, the mystery itself will join these things together. Eventually, after weeks, or months, or years of not knowing, there will come a moment when you think, “Aw, yeah! That’s it! That’s it! That’s what I’ve been looking for!” The solution appears, so simple and so elegant that it almost seems mathematical. You think, “That's been staring at me for the past two years, three years. How come I couldn’t see it?” Well, the fact of the matter is you couldn’t see it because you can’t see the beautiful simplicity at first. You have to do a lot of messy work to get there.
COLUM McCANN
There are three necessary elements in a story—exposition, development, and drama. Exposition we may illustrate as “John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little town of X”; development as “One day Mrs. Fortescue told him she was about to leave him for another man”; and drama as “You will do nothing of the kind,” he said.
FRANK O’CONNOR
My goal when I sit down to write out of my own circumstances is not to make myself transparent. In fact, I am building an edifice. Stone by stone, I am constructing a story. Brick by brick, I am learning what image, what memory belongs to what. I am arranging the pieces that come my way, as Virginia Woolf suggests in her diary. I am attempting to make a piece of music as clear, as emotionally resonant and orderly, as a sonata. I am striving to make order out of chaos, which is the sweetest pleasure I know. When I succeed, I have a thing, this story, to offer. It isn’t me. It isn’t even a facsimile. I have used my life — rather than my life using me — to make something more beautiful and refined than I could ever be.
DANI SHAPIRO
I shock creative writing students, their tutors even more, when I say I only ever write one draft. But it’s true. It just comes out of my head through my ears on to the page. I finish, correct and tidy up, and that’s it. If I get stuck, or reach the end knowing this one just doesn’t work, I throw it away. There’s always another idea or three waiting in the wings, or the notebook.
SUSAN HILL
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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