Writers On Writing

Quotations by and for the writing-inclined, as long as the words are affecting, the messages true. While I appreciate these authors' sentiments, I do not always necessarily agree with them. The ultimate point is to inspire and provoke thought, and one way to achieve this is to provide contrasting, even contradictory, perspective.

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“As for work, without it, without painstaking work, any writer or artist definitely remains a dilettante; there’s no point in waiting for so-called blissful moments, for inspiration; if it comes, so much the better--but you keep working anyway.”

-- Ivan Turgenev

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“It’s a dismally lonely business, writing.”

-- Toni Cade Bambara

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Zadie Smith’s “10 Good Writing Habits”

When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

Don’t romanticize your “vocation.” You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle.” All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing better than it is.

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand--but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

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When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go one from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

Ernest Hemingway

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“8 Good Writing Practices” by Neil Gaiman

Write.

Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or it doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

Laugh at your own jokes.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

From the man himself. So simple and straightforward, yet attainable and indelible. This is definitely one of the best pieces of advice and inspiration you will find.

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Ronald Knox’s “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction”

The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

No hither to undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

No Chinaman must figure in the story.

No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

The detective must not himself commit the crime.

The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Editor’s note:

Much like certain deplorable words Knox uses, many of his “commandments” are now obsolete by today’s standards. However, he does offer a few nuggets of pertinent insight if you can stomach the rest. Furthermore, the excessive specificity is pretty comical.

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If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

Ernest Hemingway

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“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”

- Ray Bradbury

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“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is... the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

- Mark Twain

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“I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way--one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.”

- Kazuo Ishiguro

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There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

Ernest Hemingway

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“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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“My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school masters of ever afterward.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.”

- Neil Gaiman

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“Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dishwashing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur. If you don’t know what comes next in the story... clean your toilet. Change the bed sheets. For Christ sakes, dust the computer. A better idea will come.”

-- Chuck Palahniuk

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At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammar and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.

Laura Kasischke