Reading Is Hard Enough

Reading is hard enough. I realize I’m asking you to come along for a lengthy journey; you’re wasting a good chunk of your week with me, so let’s make this interesting and not too painful. But this is the paradox of the writer, because you must be aware of your reader, but only subconsciously, for if you think too hard about what they want, you will sink your ship before it even sets sail…. You are not only writing for yourself, of course, but you better be prepared to be, because often our works never see the light of day. And this seems fine. We think the world needs our stories but it doesn’t, really. It needs maths and sciences teachers.

REIF LARSEN

Write Towards a Reader Who Respects You

I do sometimes try to tone-correct by imagining that my smartest and funniest friend is reading a piece. You want to write towards a reader who respects you, even though that’s not always what’s going to happen—you might as well act as if that’s the case, you know? You can always tell when a writer doesn’t respect his or her readers, feels superior to them. I also try to keep an argument tight by asking myself at the end of a draft if somebody who completely disagrees with my politics could still read it and understand that I’m writing honestly. Writing about women’s issues is good for working out that test.

JIA TOLENTINO

Write Down to the Clear Water

I think of acting and writing as pretty much the same thing. It's all about getting inside the skin of your characters, and seeing where they are, and knowing how they've grown up. You have to know all this, like, in your bones, what they've come up against, who they are. And then you just start talking as them. And you write until the rust comes out of the faucet and it's clear water. And you write down the clear water.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

The Radar Is on Whether You Know It or Not

The radar is on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off. You hear this piece of conversation from across the room, “I just can't stand you anymore...” That's a song. It just flows in. And also the other thing about being a songwriter, when you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer, you start to distance yourself. You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing people, how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you weirdly distant. You shouldn't really be doing it. It's a little of Peeping Tom to be a songwriter. You start looking round, and everything's a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it. And you say, I can't believe nobody hooked up on that one before! Luckily there are more phrases than songwriters, just about.

KEITH RICHARDS

Good Fiction Comes from the Same Place as Our Dreams

We’re all born with an imagination. Everybody gets one. And I really believe—this is just from years of daily writing—that good fiction comes from the same place as our dreams. I think the desire to step into someone else’s dream world is a universal impulse that’s shared by us all. That’s what fiction is. As a writing teacher, if I say nothing else to my students, it’s this.

ANDRE DUBUS III

Procrastination Is Part of the Process

Procrastination, in its weird way, is part of the process. While I’m procrastinating, I’m never really free of the task; I’m turning the creative problem over and over in my mind, consciously and unconsciously, reformulating the terms. At some level I am saying no to the easy, knock-it-out solution, the tired-and-true, the familiar.

DAWN RAFFEL

You Have to Work with What You've Got

I don't write like my mother, but for many years I spoke like her, and her particular, timorous relationship with language has shaped my own. There are people who move confidently within their own horizons of speech; whether it is cockney, estuary, RP or valley girl, they stride with the unselfconscious ease of a landowner on his own turf. My mother, Rose, was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb. A word bomb. I've inherited her wariness, or more accurately, I learnt it as a child. I used to think I would have to spend a lifetime shaking it off. Now I know that's impossible, and unnecessary, and that you have to work with what you've got.

IAN McEWAN

The Serious Fiction Writer Always Writes About the Whole World

There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene. For him, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima affects life on the Oconee River, and there’s not anything he can do about it…. People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Writing Is Not Exactly a Scarce Resource

Writer’s block, if that’s the name for it, happens when I am boring, when my mind is flat, when I have nothing to add to what has been said and done. Therefore it happens nearly all of the time. It happens when writing is an obligation and not a desire. And I really don’t mind. It’s not clear that I am meant to pump out writing at all costs. The opposite is true. The world will be just fine without anything I might write. Writing is not exactly a scarce resource. There is far too much out there that hasn’t been read enough. So I don’t try to solve this silence. To me it is necessary.

BEN MARCUS

There Is Much in All of Us

There is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't do you any good.

BRENDA UELAND