Use Everything

You can't write well with only the nice parts of your character, and only about nice things. And I don't want even to try anymore. I want to use everything, including hate and envy and lust and fear.

ALISON LURIE

Geography Is Important

More and more, I’m coming to think that geography is as important as point of view. We’re always thinking of character or plot and arguing which comes first. But think about it: How much would we care about Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion if they weren’t traveling down the Yellow Brick Road trying to get to the Emerald City?

CAROLYN SEE

It's Never as Bad as You Thought

There exists this moment before I edit where I feel completely overwhelmed. This is, quite literally, part of my process. I get this sense of literary vertigo, like I’m staring over the cliff’s edge into the crashing gears of some giant malevolent machine that I cannot comprehend and that I am sure will crush me into my constituent parts. And in this moment I want to back away and say, “Fuck it, I’m not doing this, I’m done, game over, my work sucks, I’m not a writer, I’m just some asshole, I can’t hack it, I can’t–” And then I leap over the cliff’s edge and let the gears take me. And that’s when I find out it wasn’t as bad as I thought. It’s never as bad as you thought.

CHUCK WENDIG

Writing Should Be Exploratory

Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing you thought you wanted to express. And as you work, other kinds of meaning emerge than what you might have expected. It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

On Screenwriting

A man sits down at a typewriter with some blank paper on which he types image-describing words, and at a certain point turns around and confronts some four or five hundred people, and trucks and food wagons, airplanes, horses, hotels, roads, cars, lights, all of which he has by some means, untraceable now in its complexity, evoked from nowhere and nothing. Oddly, he ends up with little power over these results of his imagination; they go their own way with not the slightest awareness that they owe their current incarnation to him.

ARTHUR MILLER

Life Is Not Always Explained

Life is not always explained. When I used to teach summer classes at Columbia, I would often take my students to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side. I would ask them to bring a notebook and to surreptitiously document, word for word, all the conversations they overheard. When we came back to the classroom we read these aloud. What we heard was fascinating. People never talk directly at one another. They seem to always talk in circles.

ANNIE DeWITT

When Your Villain Becomes a Bore

Whenever your villain becomes a bore, whatever you’re writing—play, film, whatever—wrap it up, abandon ship. Conversely, first-rate villains very often, by the mere reflection of the infinitely greater attractiveness and scope that villainy has over virtue, will endow the most numbing of dullard heroes and heroines with an appeal they couldn’t possibly attain on their own. From Mephistopheles to Rupert of Hentzau. It’s my guess Will Shakespeare found Iago a breeze to write compared to Othello; and that he sweated more over Brutus than Cassius.

JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ

We Invent Our Own Beauty

I'm trying to help us remember that we invent our own beauty and our own paths and our own crooked, weird ways of doing things, but that they're not nothing and they matter, too. We're the half of culture that doesn't take the paths that are sitting right in front of us. Our song may be a little off-key, but it's a kind of beauty, too.

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH

Winokur’s Quotations Newsletter

Announcing: Winokur's Quotations on Substack

After forty-some years of collecting, I've started a newsletter. Winokur's Quotations is what it sounds like: a curated selection of the quotes I've been hoarding for decades. Not the ones you've seen a thousand times. The ones that stopped me cold, made me laugh, or said something true in a way I hadn't heard before. Two kinds of posts: a close reading of a single quotation — where it came from, why it holds up, why it matters — and periodic roundups devoted to an eminently quotable figure. Shaw. Bierce. Lebowitz. Whoever earned it. If you've been coming to this site for writing advice, you already know the sensibility. This is the same editorial instinct applied to the full range of what language can do.

Subscribe free at jonwinokur.substack.com. The first post is already up.

Bad Dialogue

Nothing can break the mood of a piece of writing like bad dialogue. My students are miserable when they are reading an otherwise terrific story to the class and then hit a patch of dialogue that is so purple and expositional that it reads like something from a childhood play by the Gabor sisters. ... I can see the surprise on my students' faces, because the dialogue looked okay on paper, yet now it sounds as if it were poorly translated from their native Hindi.

ANNE LAMOTT