Respect Your First Draft

Respect your first draft! It’s your child, just a little uncoordinated and unkempt. Don’t throw that baby out with the bathwater. The fact that you wrote it makes it significant. You must have been trying to say something, even though the manuscript may look like subliterate Sanskrit to you now.

CAROLYN SEE

Certain Subjects Need Time

I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time. . . . You’ve got to wait before you write about them.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Find What Gave You Emotion

Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling that you had. That's a five finger exercise.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Shitty First Drafts

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

ANNE LAMOTT

It's Like Going to Work

When I write, I live with my characters. It’s like going to work. You see the people at the next desk in full regalia all the time, and you know where they came from and where they are going. The point is to define the nuances of everything that’s happening with them and to find the element of their lives that is fascinating enough to record. That takes a lot of doing.

WILLIAM KENNEDY

Treat Writing As a Job

Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I’ve got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.

SARAH WATERS

Essays Marry Heaven and Hell

Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellular structure of life. Sometimes north dominates, sometimes south—but if the essay doesn’t include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails.

DONALD HALL

Most Writers Are Dead

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....

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

Quiet Yourself

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You’ll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I’m still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don’t worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.

FRANK McCOURT