First, Try to be Something Else

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/ missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age — say, 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire.

LORRIE MOORE

One Pushes On

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is. But one pushes on because one has to pay bills.

ANTHONY BURGESS

Read Aloud

You can get what you need to write (as opposed to what you need to make a big nuisance of yourself at cocktail parties) by shutting yourself in a room by yourself for twenty minutes a day and reading aloud from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, and going on from that to other works of skill, until you begin to see, by hearing, how much the choice and arrangement of the words contribute to the impact of the story, even when no sound is uttered in its reading. And you will begin to see, very quickly—guaranteed.

GEORGE V. HIGGINS

Each Must Find His Own Way

Often I am asked if any writer ever helped or advised me. None did. However, I was not asking for help either, and I do not believe one should. If one wishes to write, he or she had better be writing, and there is no real way in which one writer can help another. Each must find his own way.

LOUIS L’AMOUR

How to Organize A Magazine Article

You can organize a magazine article rudimentarily as a sandwich: two slices of experience or reporting or essay filled with a primer on the subject under discussion. I used that structure in desperation more than once and even got by with it. More sophisticated organization requires interweaving. The best way to do that is to let your narrative determine when you stop and fill in the basics. You find something in your research that you believe readers will recognize and use that to open the story. When you come to a point that's likely to be unfamiliar, you cut away long enough to explain the context, then cut back to narrative, and so on through the article.

RICHARD RHODES

Nice Writing Isn't Enough

Nice writing isn't enough. It isn't enough to have smooth and pretty language. You have to surprise the reader frequently, you can't just be nice all the time. Provoke the reader. Astonish the reader. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Use one startling adjective per page.

ANNE BERNAYS

Two Secrets for Young Writers from Harlan Ellison

To young writers I give only two secrets that really exist...all the other hints of Rosetta Stones are jiggery-pokery. The two secrets are these:

     First, the most important book you can ever read, not only to prepare you as a writer, but to prepare you for life, is not the Bible or some handbook on syntax. It is the complete canon of Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

     The Holmes mysteries are nailed to the fixed point of logic and rational observation. They teach that ratiocination, and a denial of paralogia, go straight to the heart of Pasteur’s admonition that “Chance favors the prepared mind.” The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.

     From Doyle’s stories an awakened intelligence can learn a system of rational behavior coupled with an ability to bring the process of deductive logic to bear on even the smallest measure of day-to-day existence. It works in life, and it works in art. We call it the writer’s eye. And that, melded to talent and composure, is what one can find in the work of every fine writer.

     The second secret, what they never tell you, is that yes, anyone can become a writer. Merely consider any novel by Judith Krantz and you’ll know it’s true. The trick is not to become a writer, it is to stay a writer. Day after day, year after year, book after book. And for that, you must keep working, even when it seems beyond you. In the words-to-live-by of Thomas Carlyle, “Produce!  Produce!  Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou has in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.  Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.”

     All that, and learn the accurate meaning of “viable,” do not pronounce it noo-kew-ler, understand the difference between “in a moment” and “momentarily,” and don’t say “hopefully” when you mean “it is to be hoped” or “one hopes.” Because, for one last quotation, as Molly Haskell has written: “language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.”

HARLAN ELLISON

Nicholas Boileau's Advice to Writers (via Florence King)

For advice on writing, nothing beats Nicolas Boileau, founder of the Académie Française, who wrote a creative-writing course in verse called L'Art Poetique. It dates to the mid-l7th century but it's still the best around. The translation is by John Dryden. Some samples:

On cutting:

Polish, repolish, every color lay,

Sometimes add, but oftener take away.

On not messing up your murder mystery with a love story, and avoiding comic relief:

Remember always never to bring

A tame in union with a savage thing.

On avoiding too many subplots, unnecessary characters, and the urge to put all you know in one book:

Make not your tale of accidents too full;

Too much variety will make it dull.

Achilles' rage alone., when wrought with skill,

Abundantly does a whole Iliad fill.

FLORENCE KING

How to Overcome Writer's Block

Writer’s block, how to overcome it: write something substantial every morning, and while doing so forget entirely the impression you’re creating. That is, overcome ego.

PAUL FUSSELL

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

Reading Reviews of Your Own Book Is A No-Win Game

Reading reviews of your own book is ... a no-win game. If the review is flattering, one tends to feel vain and uneasy. If it is bad, one tends to feel exposed, found out. Neither feeling does you any good.

WALKER PERCY

Hollywood Appreciates Confidence

Use a good-quality printer or high-quality copier. Laser printing or its equivalent. If it’s not crisp, clear, and clean, it’s canned. It’s fine to make multiple submissions in Hollywood, but producers won’t return a script without an SASE. Because it costs more to mail a script today, e-mail is the standard. And Hollywood appreciates confidence. So think positively and fire off your best and brightest work.

TONY BILL

The Use of Commas Cannot Be Learned by Rule

The use of commas cannot be learned by rule. Not only does conventional practice vary from period to period, but good writers of the same period differ among themselves. . . . The correct use of the comma—if there is such a thing as “correct” use—can only be acquired by common sense, observation and taste.

SIR ERNEST GOWERS

Celebrity Is A Mask That Eats Into the Face

Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being "somebody," to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the "successful" writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip—all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dining room table, with a child's beautifully clear eyes.

JOHN UPDIKE

No Day Without A Line

It is helpful to write always at the same time of day. Scheduled obligations often raise problems, but an hour or two can almost always be found in the early morning-when the telephone never rings and no one knocks at the door. And it is important that you write something, regardless of quantity, every day. As the Romans put it, Nulla dies sine linea-No day without a line. (They were speaking of lines drawn by artists, but the rule applies as well to the writer.) As a result of all this, the setting almost automatically evokes verbal behavior. No warm-up is needed. A circadian rhythm develops that is extremely powerful. At a certain time every day, you will be highly disposed to engage in serious verbal behavior.

B.F. SKINNER

A Character Is Never A Whole Person

A character is never a whole person, but just those parts of him that fit the story or the piece of writing. So the act of selection is the writer's first step in delineating character. From what does he select? From a whole mass of what Bernard DeVoto used to call, somewhat clinically, "placental material." He must know an enormous amount more about each of his characters than he will ever use directly—childhood, family background, religion, schooling, health, wealth, sexuality, reading, tastes, hobbies—an endless questionnaire for the writer to fill out. For example, the writer knows that people speak, and therefore his characters will describe themselves indirectly when they talk. Clothing is a means of characterization. In short, each character has a style of his own in everything he does. These need not all be listed, but the writer should have a sure grasp of them. If he has, his characters will, within the book, read like people.

WILLIAM SLOANE

Children Like to Read About Success

Children like to read about success, whether it’s winning the hand of the best princess or prince, saving a life, helping people who need it, beating the other team in the game of the year, or discovering another universe.

JANET and ISAAC ASIMOV

Thou Shalt Remain Solvent

One of the basic commandments that a freelancer must obey is, Thou Shalt Remain Solvent. This commandment does not preclude getting into debt, but it does preclude a state of insolvency that destroys the freelancer’s ability to function. A writer is no better on a given day than his state of mind permits him to be, and if he allows himself to reach a point where, like an athlete in a slump who isn’t producing, he starts to press and even question his ability, then he falls victim to his insolvency. And the awful consequence of this insolvency is that he must get a paying job, God forbid, and turn in his free-lance medallion.

A.E. HOTCHNER

Never Fear the Audience

Never fear [the audience] or despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, but above all . . . never, never, never bore the hell out of it.

NOEL COWARD

Be in love with yr life

Be in love with yr life

Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

Blow as deep as you want to blow

Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind

Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

JACK KEROUAC