Don't Include Camera Angles

Don’t include camera angles or other technical directions [in your screenplay]. Those are the director’s or editor’s or D.P.’s jobs. No CLOSE SHOT, PAN, ZOOM IN, or any of the dozens of others you happen to know…unless there is a rare occasion when it is absolutely necessary for a story point. In fact, the direction CUT TO is a waste of space on the page and generally a redundancy: How do you usually get from one scene to another if not by cutting to it? (Yeah, I know: dissolve, wipe, flip, fade, etc. Don’t write any of them.) No references to other movies. And no music; especially no lyrics. That’s why they invented composers and music supervisors.

TONY BILL

Give It the First Energy of the Day

I give it the first energy of the day. When I get up, I go to my office and start writing. I'm still in my pajamas. I haven't even brushed my teeth. I just go straight to it. I feel that there's a little package of creative energy that's somehow been nourished by sleep and I don't want to waste that. I'll work for an hour or two until I feel like I've got something going. Then I can get washed and dressed.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

The Vocabulary of Grammar

Our schools now often teach little of an essential and once common knowledge, the vocabulary of grammar—the techspeak of language and writing. Words such as subject, predicate, object, or adjective and adverb, or past tense and past-perfect tense, are half understood by or wholly unfamiliar to many. Yet they’re the names of the writer’s tools. They’re the words you need when you want to say what’s wrong or right in a sentence. A writer who doesn’t know them is like a carpenter who doesn’t know a hammer from a screwdriver. (“Hey, Pat, if I use that whatsit there with the kinda pointy end, will it get this thing into this piece of wood?”)

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Write a Little Bit Every Day

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

MADELEINE L’ENGLE

The Power of the Written Word

Psychoanalysts in France, structuralists in the United States and France, conservative, liberal and left-wing thinkers in contemporary schools of linguistic philosophy agree about one thing; man became man not by the tool but by the Word. It is not walking upright and using a stick to dig for food or strike a blow that makes a human being, it is speech. And neither intelligent apes nor dolphins whispering marvels in the ocean share with us the ability to transform this direct communication into the written word, which sets up an endless chain of communication and commune between peoples and generations who will never meet.

NADINE GORDIMER

Write!

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. You feel dull, you have a headache, nobody loves you, write. If all feels hopeless, if that famous “inspiration” will not come, write. If you are a genius, you’ll make your own rules, but if not – and the odds are clearly against it – go to your desk, no matter what your mood, face the very challenge of the paper – write.

J. B. PRIESTLEY

The Characters Arrive First

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got — and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

WILLIAM GIBSON

Readers Are More Sophisticated Than Critics

Readers, I think, are more sophisticated on the whole than critics. They can make the jumps, they can make imaginative leaps. If your structure is firm and solid enough, however strange, however unusual, they will be able to follow it. They will climb with you to the most unlikely places if they trust you, if the words give them the right footholds, the right handholds. That’s what I want my readers to do: I want them to come with me when we’re going mountain-climbing. This isn’t a walk through a theme park. This is some dangerous place that neither of us has been before, and I hope that by traveling there first, I can encourage the reader to come with me and that we will make the trip again together, and safely.

JEANETTE WINTERSON 

Writing Should Be Kind of Invisible

Writing is trying hard to do two things, as I see it. One is to be entertaining in itself. Any page of good prose has something of the quality of a poem. It’s interesting in itself even if you don’t know the story or quite what you’re reading. It has a kind of abstract dynamism. But also it is trying to deliver images and a story to a reader, so in that sense it should be kind of invisible.

JOHN UPDIKE

Characters Want to Talk

Characters don’t stand nose to nose and take turns speaking. People are selfish. So too are characters. Characters want to talk. They want to be heard. They don’t wait their turn like polite automatons. They can interrupt each other. Finish one another’s sentences. Derail conversations. Pursue agendas. Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat. It’s a battle of energy, wits, and dominance.

CHUCK WENDIG