The World Needs You

The world needs you. There is large work to be done, good work, and you can make a difference. Whatever your life work, take it seriously and enjoy it. Let’s never be the kind of people who do things lukewarmly. If you’re going to ring the bell, give the rope one hell of a pull. I wish you the fullest lives possible—full of love and bells ringing.

DAVID McCULLOUGH

The Poverty of Your Means of Expression

When you sit down to write…you think, ah, yes, the entire world and all its strange nuances, and subtleties, and inexpressibilities are about to surge through my arm into the pencil I’m holding. And then you look down at what you’ve written and it’s something like, And so he walked to the grocery store…. That feeling of the richness of the world and the poverty of your means of expression is one of the inescapable features of writing fiction. One finds that one’s thought is much more conventionalized than one would have guessed.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

You Never Know Who Your Readers Might Be

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Works in Progress

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

ANNIE DILLARD

Good Communicators

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination.

ALAIN DE BOTTON

The First Draft of Anything Is Shit

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A Good Sentence

A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection. (If you want to puzzle your reader, that’s your own business.)

BENJAMIN DREYER

Do It Your Way

Write. Start writing today. Start writing right now. Don’t write it right, just write it –and then make it right later. Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one. Be wary of “writing rules” and advice. Do it your way.

TARA MOSS

The Specific

I get a tape of a comedian named Ray Romano. I just asked him, “Tell me about yourself, where you come from” and he said, “I got twin boys and an older daughter, and my family lives close by and they're always bothering me. My brother Is older and he's a police sergeant and he lives with them. He's divorced. He's jealous of me. He saw an award that I won for stand-up and he said, ‘Never ends for Raymond. Everybody loves Raymond.’”

I thought, That's a good place to start! The lesson is, the more specific you get—not just in writing, but in everything in life—the more universal it becomes, the more people you hit. Because we all deal in specificity. So even if there's a crazy thing about you that isn’t something I do, I'm going to relate to it because I do a crazy thing too. The hook is the specific.

PHIL ROSENTHAL

You Won't Be Able to Quit

If you’re going to be a writer you’ll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think “There must be something else people do,” you won’t be able to quit.

ALICE MUNRO