What Matters

What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, nor who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say.

DAVE EGGERS

Poetry Is Not a Luxury

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

AUDRE LORDE

You Are the Freest of All Artists

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it’s been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you’re letting the novel make its own shape, and you’re putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating. You can do absolutely anything; you are the freest of all artists. You’re not confined by a square on the wall or musical scales or the disciplines of verse, and you’re certainly freer than a film-maker who is dependent on the weather when he goes out to make his world. And it’s completely uncollaborative – you don’t have actors; producers; money pressures of any kind. It’s that freedom that is frightening in the end. So you have all that pleasure, but what you’ve also got to put into it – and you can’t do this consciously; it just demands it of you – you’ve got to put anxiety into it.

MARTIN AMIS

Art Should Simplify

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying, of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was better and more universal.

Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can’t be a cheap workman; he can’t be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise.

WILLA CATHER

Title Anxiety

Several times I’ve wanted to title something one thing, but have realized or been persuaded it isn’t a good idea. I’ve known for a long time that there isn’t a copyright on titles, but still . . . do I want to get into the confusion that causes? (Also, I’m rarely good at it. For years, Roger Angell, my editor at The New Yorker, titled most of my stories.) I mention this because while I don’t begin a story with a title in mind 95% of the time, I have anxiety about coming up with one, and when I do, it will often have been taken. So there it is: inherent title anxiety. It floats like a dark cloud over the story that does not yet exist.

ANN BEATTIE

Take Possession of Yourself

At one time I imagined that if I wrote like other people, if I imitated writers I liked, I would only have to expose myself through a disguise. I did this for a time, but my own self kept coming through. It took me a while to see that it isn't a question of discovering your voice but of seeing that you have a voice already, just as you have a personality, and that if you continue to write you have no choice but to speak, write, and live in it.What you have to do, in a sense, is take possession of yourself. The human being and the writer are the same. It is only with the heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

HANIF KOUREISHI

Don't Write What You Know

When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.

TONI MORRISON

A Writer's Solitude

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

REBECCA SOLNIT

A Writer Should Be a Critic of Society

It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. It is easy enough, and always profitable, to rail away at national enemies beyond the sea, at foreign powers beyond our borders who question the prevailing order. But the moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home; to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own culture. If the writer is unwilling to fill this part, then the writer should abandon pretense and find another line of work: become a shoe repairman, a brain surgeon, a janitor, a cowboy, a nuclear physicist, a bus driver.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Simple Structure Will Do

A simple and straightforward structure will do. Structure is one of those craft decisions that unfortunately one cannot avoid when writing a novel. Some novels may be remembered for their ingenious structures, but a novel does not have to have an ingenious structure to be great. A simple structure will do just fine. For instance, War and Peace has the most straightforward structure: the novel alternates between war (characters in the military settings) and peace (characters in the civilian settings). A complex book doesn’t have to have a complicated structure.

YIYUN LI