Writing Is a Weapon Against Boredom

I still feel strongly that the one thing a writer has above all else, the reward which is bigger than anything that may come to him after huge advances and Hollywood adaptations, is the weapon against boredom. The question of how to spend his time, what to do today, tomorrow, and during all the other pockets of time in between when some doing is required: this is not applicable to the writer. For he can always lose himself in the act of writing and make time vanish. After which, he actually has something to show for his efforts. Not bad. Very good, in fact. Maybe too romantic a conceit, but this, I believed, was the great prize for being born … an author.

JULIAN TEPPER

How It's Written Counts

People mistakenly believe the best memoir is the one in which the grossest stuff happens. If that were true then everybody who was at Auschwitz would have written a best seller. People had way worse childhoods than I did and they didn’t sell as many books. How it’s written counts for something.

MARY KARR

Go In Fear of Abstraction

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as dim land of peace. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

EZRA POUND

Metaphor Is the Tendon Connecting Muscle to Bone

Metaphor is the tendon connecting muscle to bone. See what I did there? I used metaphor to describe metaphor. That’s how a writer does things. That’s some hard-ass penmonkey trickery, son. What? What? You gonna step? You gonna front all up in my face-grill? Ahem. Sorry. Where was I? Right. Metaphor takes a mundane part of the story and connects it to the larger experience of the audience. It says, “This little thing is like this bigger thing, this other thing.” Metaphor is less about fact and more about feel.

CHUCK WENDIG

You Are the Freest of All Artists

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it’s been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you’re letting the novel make its own shape, and you’re putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating. You can do absolutely anything; you are the freest of all artists. You’re not confined by a square on the wall or musical scales or the disciplines of verse, and you’re certainly freer than a film-maker who is dependent on the weather when he goes out to make his world. And it’s completely uncollaborative – you don’t have actors; producers; money pressures of any kind. It’s that freedom that is frightening in the end. So you have all that pleasure, but what you’ve also got to put into it – and you can’t do this consciously; it just demands it of you – you’ve got to put anxiety into it.

MARTIN AMIS

Listen Attentively

I listen attentively in bars and cafes, while standing in line at the checkout counter, noting particular pronunciations and the rhythms of regional speech, vivid turns of speech and the duller talk of everyday life. In Melbourne I paid money into the hand of a sidewalk poetry reciter to hear "The Spell of the Yukon," in London listened to a cabby's story of his psychopath brother in Paris, on a trans-Pacific flight heard from a New Zealand engineer the peculiarities of building a pipeline across New Guinea.

ANNIE PROULX

We Empathize, We Project

I don’t think that a writer who writes about loss (if I do) needs to have suffered loss himself. We can imagine loss. That’s the writer’s job. We empathize, we project, we make much of what might be small experience. Hemingway (as usual, full of wind) said “only write about what you know.” But that can’t mean you should only write about what you yourself have done or experienced. A rule like that pointlessly straps the imagination, confines one’s curiosity, one’s capacity to empathize. After all, a novel (if it chooses) can cause a reader to experience sensation, emotion, to recognize behavior that reader may never have seen before. The writer’ll have to be able to do that, too. Some subjects just cause what Katherine Anne Porter called a “commotion in the mind.” That commotion may or may not be a response to what we actually did on earth.

RICHARD FORD

Tragedy Attracts Awards

I want them all to have happy endings although I do realize this is not true to life. But I get attached to my characters and I don't really want to do them in. And I think it is significant that the only book of mine that got a big literary award [the Pulitzer for Foreign Affairs] was the only one in which I've killed off a major character. Somehow tragedy attracts awards and comedy doesn't.

ALISON LURIE

You Have No Refuge but Writing

My work is emotionally autobiographical. It has no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life. I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you’re going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Translation Is a Case of Negotiation

I have edited countless translations, translated two works myself, and have had my own novels translated into dozens of languages. And I’ve found that every translation is a case of negotiation. If you sell something to me and I buy it, we negotiate—you’ll lose something, I’ll lose something, but at the end we’re both more or less satisfied. In translation, style is not so much lexicon, which can be translated by the Web site Altavista, but rhythm. Researchers have run tests on the frequency of words in Manzoni’s The Betrothed, the masterpiece of nineteenth-century Italian literature. Manzoni had an absolutely poor vocabulary, devised no innovative metaphors, and used the adjective good a frightening amount of times. But his style is outstanding, pure and simple. To translate it, as with all great translations, you need to bring out the anima of his world, its breath, its precise tempo.

UMBERTO ECO