What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.
JOY WILLIAMS
I think that one of the problems with twentieth-century art is its preoccupation with subjectivity and originality at the expense of everything else. This has been especially true in painting and music. Though initially stimulating, this soon impeded the full development of any particular style, and rewarded uninteresting and sterile originality. At the same time, it is very sad to say, films have had the opposite problem -- they have consistently tried to formalize and repeat success, and they have clung to a form and style introduced in their infancy. The sure thing is what everyone wants, and originality is not a nice word in this context. This is true despite the repeated example that nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing.
STANLEY KUBRICK
Advice is tricky when it comes to comedy, because people are either funny or they are not. If someone is funny, there are many ways to get better. Most everything I know, I learned from Gary Shandling. Whenever we got stuck, he always said, “What is the truth here? What would someone actually do?” He pushed his writers to go deeper to the core.
JUDD APATOW
Don't overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualized, 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
A book might reach out to someone else at some point, after years, or maybe never at all, but it is not up to me to write with this idea in mind. Writing is, above all, an internal dialogue.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
I really like having a community of trusted collaborators who can help me figure out very early whether material is alive and whether I’m making any egregious mistakes. There is tremendous solitude around writing, and I like that. Most people who write seriously tend to be pretty solitary people. But that does not mean that I can work in isolation and know if what I’m doing is good. I need a community to help me understand what’s working and what isn’t, and I really encourage people to try to find that.
JENNIFER EGAN
I realized I was going to have to get up at five in the morning if I wanted to write fiction. It took a while, the alarm would go off and I’d roll over. Finally I started to get up and go into the living room and sit at the coffee table with a yellow pad and try to write two pages. I made a rule that I had to get something down on paper before I could put the water on for coffee. Know where you’re going and then put the water on. That seemed to work because I did it for most of the fifties.
ELMORE LEONARD
The young people ask me about becoming a writer, and they really haven’t read, not even read bad stuff. They haven’t experienced reading as happiness, as it were. So without some knowledge of what other writers have done, it’s very hard to find your own way, I think. We’re all thieves, I suppose.
JOHN UPDIKE
I think one of the reasons I like writing first thing, early in the morning, is because that’s when I’m a bit sleepy, a bit off-guard, and I just put the words down on the page without thinking too much about them. When you’re wide awake, you’re thinking about how you sound to others. There’s the impulse to please or to sound cool. We all have that. So I like to put a block of words down while I’m half-asleep. I’ll use the word blah a lot—“He walked with the blah across the blah and blahed his blah until”—and keep moving, not worrying about the sentences or even making sense. Then I’ll chip away at the block of words later, when I’m awake and critical.
KEVIN BARRY
Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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