Writers Read

Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books.

JUDITH BARRINGTON

The Less You Say, the Better It Is

When I began to write novels, I wanted to keep that element of interaction with the reader that exists in poetry, not just for the reader to be shepherded from A to B to C to D but to participate, and the less you say sometimes, the better it is. You know, it’s the way when someone speaks very quietly, you move forward so you can listen more carefully.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

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

Do It Badly

Stop NOT writing. Just do it, badly. Just write the thing you need or want to write, that you are avoiding. That avoidance is costing you greatly, isometrically, and in general well-being. So can you find one measly hour, to write, badly?

ANNE LAMOTT

Use Adverbs Sparingly

All adverbs, save temporal ones—quickly, suddenly, immediately, etc.—are unnecessary, and the mark of a distracted writer, which is to say a weak writer. They admit that the necessary work was not done earlier; they exist then as a patch job, a bang-on modifier, telling the reader how to feel rather than exploring, in a partnership of equity with the writer, the territories of the emotion and its circumstances. They’re quite often a very bad thing.

RICK BASS

Don't Write from Experience

Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

NIKKI GIOVANNI

Frustration Is Part of the Process

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that frustration is a part of the process. I’ve rarely written anything good that did not come out of moments of extreme frustration. It’s the frustration that propels you forward. If it doesn’t — if you back away from it — the work will be less than it could have been. When I teach writing, I find that students are relieved to hear this...that frustration is an indication of a literary problem to be solved, not a sign that they aren’t good enough writers.

DIANNE WARREN

There's No Writer's Block

There’s no writer’s block. There’s lazy. There’s scared. But there’s no writer’s block. Just sit down and realize you’re mediocre and you’re going to have to put a lot of effort into this to make it good. That’s what writing is.

JERRY SEINFELD

Don't Expect It to Be Easy

Carpenters don’t say, I’m just not feeling it today, or I don’t give a damn about this staircase and whether people fall through it; how you feel is something that you cannot take too seriously on your way to doing something, and doing something is a means of not being stuck in how you feel. That is, there’s a kind of introspection that’s wallowing and being stuck, and there’s a kind that gets beyond that into something more interesting and then maybe takes you out into the world or into the place where deepest interior and cosmological phenomena are at last talking to each other. I’ve written stuff amidst hideous suffering, and it was a way not to be so stuck in the hideous suffering, though it was hard, but also, hard is not impossible, and I didn’t sign up with the expectation that it would be easy.

REBECCA SOLNIT

The Writing Trades

This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

KURT VONNEGUT