Plagiarism

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.

VOLTAIRE

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism—of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

JOSEPH EPSTEIN

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Plagiarism of style is the most nefarious of all forms of plagiarism and the shabbiest.

RAYMOND CHANDLER

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

HOWARD AIKEN

Most Humor Depends on Specificity

Most humor depends on specificity. It’s funnier to say that a cheese steak tastes better when you’re leaning up against a Pontiac than when you are leaning up against a car.

CALVIN TRILLIN

The Best Moments Involve a Loss of Control

First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often—completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages—I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

DON DeLILLO

Go On When You Don’t Feel Like It

Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing to do is shovel shit from a sitting position.

STEPHEN KING

Imagination and Inspiration

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.

WILLIAM BLAKE

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

CHARLES DICKENS

If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing done.

WILLIAM STYRON

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.

BILLY COLLINS

Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don’t write them down.

W.P. KINSELLA

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

NEIL GAIMAN

You go to the attic of your mind and rummage around and find something.

MARY HIGGINS CLARK

Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

RAY BRADBURY

Put Your Notes Away

Put your notes away before you begin a draft. What you remember is probably what should be remembered; what you forget is probably what should be forgotten. No matter; you’ll have a chance to go back to your notes after the draft is completed. What is important is to achieve a draft which allows the writing to flow.

DONALD M. MURRAY

We're All Thieves

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

Steal!

Steal! And egad, serve your best thoughts as gypsies do stolen children, disfigure them and make ‘em pass for their own.

RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN

It's Like Boiling Down

It’s like boiling down. Four pages can go through six, eight, ten drafts to get down. The beginning is always rewritten much more than the rest, because it’s the setting up of information as well as the telling of the story—that’s always much harder to juggle.

SUSAN MINOT

Don't Try to Guess What Editors and Readers Want

Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Prescription for Writer's Block

My prescription for writer’s block is to face the fact that there is no such thing. It’s an invented condition, a literary version of the judicial “abuse excuse.” Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It’s a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.

THOMAS MALLON

Prose Should Be A Long Intimacy Between Strangers

Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.

HENRY GREEN

Ask A Friend

You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Secret of Getting Ahead

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

MARK TWAIN

Be Ruthless About Protecting Writing Days

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.

J.K. ROWLING

Go Straight to What You Know Best

As you get older, you should get impatient with showing off in literature. It is easier to settle for blazing light than to find a language for the real. Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best.

THOMAS McGUANE

Something Should Remain Unsaid

Narrative art must be clear, but it must also be mysterious. Something should remain unsaid, something just beyond our understanding, a secret. If it's only clear, it's kitsch; if it's only mysterious (a much easier path), it's condescending and pretentious and soon monotonous.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

One Thought Per Sentence

One maxim that my students find helpful is: One thought per sentence. Readers only process one thought at a time. So give them time to digest the first set of facts you want them to know. Then give them the next piece of information they need to know, which further explains the first fact. Be grateful for the period. Writing is so hard that all us, once launched, tend to ramble. Instead of a period we use a comma, followed by a transitional word (and, while), and soon we have strayed into a wilderness that seems to have no road back out. Let the humble period be your savior. There’s no sentence too short to be acceptable in the eyes of God.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Avoid Prologues

Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

ELMORE LEONARD

Don't Look Back Until You've Written An Entire First Draft

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . the edit.

WILL SELF