The Secret of Good Writing

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

Reliable Versus Unreliable Narrators

I’ve always found the concept of the reliable versus the unreliable narrator peculiar, because I think all narrators are unreliable [laughs]. People tell you what they saw or what they think or what they felt, and they may be telling you the truth, but it might not at all be what someone else saw happen. Like, people always call Humbert Humbert an unreliable narrator. He’s very reliable. He’ll tell you exactly what he thought and felt in a lot of detail. And you also get a very clear sense of what Lolita is experiencing through him. But I don’t think of it as unreliable. I think more in terms, and this sounds really corny, I think more in terms of, Do I care what this narrator thinks and feels? Can he engage me? With students, the problem I see most often is that I don’t get a sense of what their narrators care about. What they want. What matters to them. That’s a bigger issue to me than whether or not they’re reliable in some way.

MARY GAITSKILL

Coincidence in Fiction

An observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to those who sneer at the use of coincidence in fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences.

RAFAEL SABATINI

Self-Doubt

I have more self-doubt than any writer I've ever known....The positive aspect of self-doubt—if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it—is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image.

DEAN KOONTZ

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

Literary Talent Isn't Rare

The funny thing about it all is that literary talent isn’t rare. Lots of people can write good stories with good characters and great sentences. What’s rare is the stubborn, pragmatic thing that tells you “I’ve got to do this every single fucking day, even when I don’t want to do it, when I’d rather pluck my eyes out and feed them to the birds.” That discipline combined with talent is very rare. I’d be willing to bet that some of the most brilliant writers who ever lived have never been published, because they weren’t prepared to do the work. You have to make sacrifices and be utterly selfish. Everything else and everyone else is secondary to your writing.

KEVIN BARR

Close the Door and Write

My block was due to two overlapping factors: laziness and lack of discipline. If you really want to write, then shut yourself in a room, close the door, and WRITE. If you don't want to write, do something else. It's as simple as that.

MARY GARDEN

Find the Universal in the Local

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

WILLIAM TREVOR

Butt in Chair

We read a lot about writers who have a “butt in chair” philosophy, who crank out a minimum of a thousand words every day rain or shine. If you are one of them, I am genuinely happy for you — and for me, because I get to read your books on a regular basis. But I’m also here to reassure people who don’t work this way that they are not alone. Sometimes it’s impossible to get writing done, especially for those of us who have other work to do, including care work for our children or parents. And sometimes, like now, the world is so in flux that our brains are filled with static and we can’t hear our own thoughts. At these times, surviving daily life is enough to occupy every corner of our consciousness.

EMILY GOULD

Art Is About Something Else

Anything that is art . . . is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.

EDWARD GOREY