Don't Overcrowd the Narrative

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

The Answer Is to Write

If you’re afraid you can’t write, the answer is to write. Every sentence you construct adds weight to the balance pan. If you’re afraid of what other people will think of your efforts, don’t show them until you write your way beyond your fear. If writing a book is impossible, write a chapter. If writing a chapter is impossible, write a page. If writing a page is impossible, write a paragraph. If writing a paragraph is impossible, write a sentence. If writing even a sentence is impossible, write a word and teach yourself everything there is to know about that word and then write another, connected word and see where their connection leads. A page a day is a book a year.

RICHARD RHODES

There Are No Original Stories

I would say to young playwrights, especially, don’t worry so much about the story. There are no original stories. All the stories have been told in one form or another. The only thing that makes a successful play is the delineation of character. Be sure you write good parts. Interesting, dramatic, amusing, romantic — it’s the characters that make the play.

GARSON KANIN

Two Ways of Looking at Writing

There are two ways of looking at writing. One way is that you’re telling a story transparently. The other is that you’re telling a story with language, and language is the point. How fast do you want your story to read? If it reads too fast then it might be superficial. A person reads it in five minutes, it’s all over.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Books Are Humanity in Print

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Write Your Own Books

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow—or kneel or get knocked down—to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

PATRICIA HAMPL

Writing Is Not an Amusing Occupation

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

EDNA FERBER

Chapters

A chapter isn’t a short story and needn’t be able to stand alone, nor is it just a random break that signifies that the novelist is tired of this particular storyline and would like to go on to something else. Chapters are like the foot pedals on a piano; they give you another level of control. Short chapters can speed the book along, while long chapters can deepen intensity. Tiny chapters—a lone paragraph or a single sentence—can be irritatingly cute. I like a chapter that both has a certain degree of autonomy and at the same time pushes the reader forward, so that someone who is reading in bed and has vowed to turn off the light at the chapter’s end will instead sit up straighter and keep turning the pages. (If you want to study the master of the well-constructed chapter—and plot and flat-out gorgeous writing—read Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye is my favorite.)

ANN PATCHETT

May You Live with Hysteria

May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

RAY BRADBURY

Listen

I listen attentively in bars and cafes, while standing in line at the checkout counter, noting particular pronunciations and the rhythms of regional speech, vivid turns of speech and the duller talk of everyday life. In Melbourne I paid money into the hand of a sidewalk poetry reciter to hear "The Spell of the Yukon," in London listened to a cabby's story of his psychopath brother in Paris, on a trans-Pacific flight heard from a New Zealand engineer the peculiarities of building a pipeline across New Guinea.

ANNIE PROULX