You Start with Too Much

There is no such thing as somebody sitting down and saying, “Now, all right, I’m going to make a new picture.” Not at all. You have ideas stashed away, dozens of them — good, bad, or indifferent. Then you pull them out of your memory, out of your drawer, you combine them…. People think when it comes to a screenplay you start with absolutely nothing. But the trouble is that you have a million ideas and you have to condense them into a thousand ideas, and you have to condense those into three hundred ideas to get it under one hat, as it were. In other words, you start with too much, not with nothing, and it can go in every kind of direction. Every possible avenue is open. They you have to dramatize it — it is as simple as that — by omitting, by simplifying, by finding a clean theme that leads someplace.

BILLY WILDER

Writers' Groups

Collaborative workshops and writers’ peer groups are good inventions. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had. A good peer group offers mutual encouragement, amicable competition, stimulating discussion, practice in criticism, and support in difficulty. If you want to and are able to join a group, do so. If you long for the stimulus of working with other writers but can’t find or attend a local group, look into the many possibilities of forming or joining one on the Internet.

URSULA LE GUIN

Writing Approaches Blasphemy

So writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world. It happens to everybody. In the morning light, one can write breezily, without the slightest acceleration of one's pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning, in panic, to God. In the dark, one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture, and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy-weighted, as they are, with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light – in codifying, distorting, prettifying or verbalizing it – approaches blasphemy.

JOHN UPDIKE

Surprises Happen

I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously—that I’m seeing it in one flash. But in the working out, the writing out, infinite surprises happen. Thank God, because surprise, the twist, the phrase that comes at the right moment out of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, that joyful little push that keeps a writer going.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

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