72 Truths About Writing
“The road to hell is paved with
works-in-progress.”
—Philip Roth
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
—Stephen King
“Who wants to become a writer? And why?
Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living.
To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to
cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to
make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold
“To gain your own voice, you have to forget
about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but
do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality
any more than you can fake a good meal.”
—William S. Burroughs
“All readers come to fiction as willing
accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment
we pick up a work of fiction.”
—Steve Almond, WD
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting
struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake
such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither
resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell
“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha
write it.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD
“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point
to my literary thinking all my life.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say
to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is
some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention,
and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
—George Orwell
“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my
stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”
—Roald Dahl, WD
“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per
piece or per word or perhaps.”
—Robert Benchley
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no
one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every
experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his
works.”
—Virginia Woolf
“Making people believe the unbelievable is no
trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come
in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned
neighborhood can stand for everything.”
—Stephen King, WD
“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses
its childhood.”
—Peter Handke
“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that
you are alive.”
—William Zinsser, WD
“If I had not existed, someone else would have
written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
—William Faulkner
“For your born writer, nothing is so healing
as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen
“Each writer is born with a repertory company
in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s
a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
—Gore Vidal
“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings.
… Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer
to find ways to make them interesting.”
—John Updike, WD
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent
in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one
book.”
—Samuel Johnson
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or,
if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we
learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the
narrative.”
—Elmore Leonard
“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or
rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”
—Larry L. King, WD
“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal
from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and
fetishizing masterpieces.”
—Allegra Goodman
“I’m out there to clean the plate. Once
they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’
I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once
they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”
—Richard Ben Cramer
“There are no laws for the novel. There never
have been, nor can there ever be.”
—Doris Lessing
“Style means the right word. The rest matters
little.”
—Jules Renard
“Style is to forget all styles.”
—Jules Renard
“I do not over-intellectualize the production
process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
—Tom Clancy, WD
“The writing of a novel is taking life as it
already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the
finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The
essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not
even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before
and will not be again.”
—Eudora Welty, WD
“One thing that helps is to give myself
permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10
pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if
I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me
no further behind than if I took the day off.”
—Lawrence Block, WD
“Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to
become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind,
there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures
into flesh and blood.”
—Leslie Gordon Barnard, WD
“If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a
brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s
reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the
bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering,
red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a
starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”
—Fred East, WD
“Plot is people. Human emotions and desires
founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and
fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s
Plot.”
—Leigh Brackett, WD
“The first sentence can’t be written until the
final sentence is written.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, WD
“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it
to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising
a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children,
but it must be done.”
—Stephen King, WD
“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What
Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future
are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for
the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.”
–Jack Kerouac, WD
“Long patience and application saturated with
your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to
find out whether you will or not is to try.”
—Jim Tully, October 1923
“All stories have to at least try to explain
some small portion of the meaning of life. You can do that in 20 minutes, and
15 inches. I still remember a piece that the great Barry Bearak did in The Miami
Herald some 30 years ago. It was a nothing story, really: Some high
school kid was leading a campaign to ban books he found offensive from the
school library. Bearak didn’t even have an interview with the kid, who was
ducking him. The story was short, mostly about the issue. But Bearak had a fact
that he withheld until the kicker. The fact put the whole story, subtly, in
complete perspective. The kicker noted the true, wonderful fact that the kid
was not in school that day because “his ulcer was acting up.” Meaning of life,
15 inches.”
—Gene Weingarten, WD
“Beware of advice—even this.”
—Carl Sandburg, WD
“I would advise anyone who aspires to a
writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a
thick hide.”
—Harper Lee, WD
“I think the deeper you go into questions, the
deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of
art.”
—Andre Dubus, WD
“Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses
can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through—originality.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD
“People say, ‘What advice do you have for
people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know
they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that
they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.”
—R.L. Stine, WD
“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake
me.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“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, WD
“Let the world burn through you. Throw the
prism light, white hot, on paper.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints
left in the snow after your characters have run by on their
way to incredible destinations.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“I don’t believe in being serious about
anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you
were born that way.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Writers are always selling somebody out.”
—Joan Didion
“Writing is not necessarily something to be
ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
—Robert A. Heinlein
“Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away
from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will
get rusty.”
—George Singleton
“There is only one plot—things are not what
they seem.”
—Jim Thompson
“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows
enough at 15 to write several novels.”
—May Sarton
“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t
stop it.”
—William Carlos Williams
“The most beautiful things are those that
madness prompts and reason writes.”
—Andre Gide
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men
who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
—Elmore Leonard
“You do not have to explain every single drop
of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop—H2O. The reader will get
it.”
—George Singleton
“When I say work I only mean writing.
Everything else is just odd jobs.”
—Margaret Laurence
“The difference between the almost right word
and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the
lightning.”
—Mark Twain
“I always start writing with a clean piece of
paper and a dirty mind.”
—Patrick Dennis
“Do not hoard what seems good for a later
place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
—Annie Dillard
“A book is simply the container of an
idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”
—Angela Carter
“I almost always urge people to write in the
first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.”
—William Zinsser
“When writing a novel a writer should
create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Write while the heat is in you. … The writer
who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to
burn a hole with.”
—Henry David Thoreau
“You don’t actually have to write anything
until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching
for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.”
—Marie de Nervaud, WD
“Whether a character in your novel is full of
choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in
there, too, as long as that character lives.”
—James Alexander Thom
“Writers live twice.”
—Natalie Goldberg
