Most Writers Are Dead

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The first question that I ask my all students, on the first day, is: “What is the number one best seller?” None of them—nobody—can answer. And I love that. Because if you don’t know the best seller, then why are you trying to write it? Instead, why don’t you try to write what you believe in? You’ll be dead. That’s the point of being a writer. Most writers are dead. By the time their books became important, they were gone.

NIKKI GIOVANNI

If It Ain’t Broke....

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Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules...afternoons are best, but I’m too lethargic for any real regime. When I’m in the flow of something I can do a regular 9 to 5; when I don’t know where I’m going with an idea, I’m lucky if I do two hours of productive work. There is nothing more off-putting to a would-be novelist to hear about how so-and-so wakes up at four in the a.m, walks the dog, drinks three liters of black coffee and then writes 3,000 words a day, or that some other asshole only works half an hour every two weeks, does fifty press-ups and stands on his head before and after the "creative moment." I remember reading that kind of stuff in profiles…and becoming convinced everything I was doing was wrong. What’s the American phrase? If it ain’t broke....

ZADIE SMITH

Writing Is One Word at a Time

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Writing is only one word at a time. It’s not a whole bunch of things happening at once. Various things can present themselves, but when you face the page, it’s a couple of words, and then a couple more words, and, if you’re lucky, a sentence or a paragraph. Because writing is linear, it must organize itself into this thin little stream that moves forward, which, if your mind is full of chaos, is quite reassuring. When I listen to music, especially symphonic music, there’s a huge number of sounds and resonances that come to me at the same time, and they must organize themselves and go into my head in an orderly way. For me to pick them apart is to turn them back into chaos. But when I look at writing, it’s all just one word at a time.

JANE SMILEY

Do It Because You Need To

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An English teacher — the best I ever had — once told me that the only way to write was to abandon oneself to it completely. I have tried to follow that advice. My own advice to aspiring writers is to be prepared for an often difficult, unstable, and roller coaster kind of life. Don’t do it because it sounds cool, easy, or glamorous. Do it because you need to.

MATTHEW CARR

Write Whatever You Want to Write

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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

The Secret of Good Writing

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The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Language Is a Freedom

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For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Memory Is a Crucial Novelist Tool

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As my own emotional life has become a little bit less tangled and turbulent and conflicted, I've been able, as a writer, to approach the characters and the world that they live in more directly. As a novelist, I have access to certain tools and strategies—for lack of a better word—that perhaps a person normally doesn't have just because, for instance, memory is a crucial novelist tool that has to be cultivated and preserved. And so I'm forced again and again through that to go back to my own childhood.

RUSSELL BANKS