Here is the third in my series of quotes about writing by writers. For the others, see Write wit and Write wit 2
A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude
and then finds endless ways to squander it.
Don Delillo
My passions drive me to the
typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was
twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always
exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the
typewriter right now and finish this.
Ray Bradbury
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| Maya Angelou |
I’ve had
the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or
asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over
the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again.
Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the
piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so
you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will
never speak to you again.
Maya Angelou
Tips for a short story writer:
- Use the time of a
total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was
wasted.
- Give the reader at
least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should
want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do
one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the
end as possible.
- Be a sadist. No matter
how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen
to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just
one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak,
your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as
much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense.
Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where
and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches
eat the last few pages.
Kurt Vonnegut
In an unmoored life like mine,
sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without
consulting me.
Kurt Vonnegut
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| Ernest Hemingway |
All my
life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
Ernest Hemingway
There
isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is
a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse.
All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see
beyond when you know.
Ernest Hemingway
The most
essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This
is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway
If there
is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been
able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey
something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may
sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the
excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story.
For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
John Steinbeck
Abandon
the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and
write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are
always surprised.
John Steinbeck
You never
have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
Saul Bellow
Write
with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
Stephen King
Fiction
is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Stephen King
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but
should finish in the reader’s.
Stephen King
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| Tom Wolfe |
The
problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.
Tom Wolfe
Write
without pay until somebody offers pay; if nobody offers within three years,
sawing wood is what you were intended for.
Mark Twain
There’s
nothing wrong with well-made, strongly constructed, purposeful long sentences.
But long
sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over
their awkwardness.
They’re
pasted together with false syntax.
And rely
on words like ‘with’ and ‘as’ to lengthen the sentence.
They’re
short on verbs, weak in syntactic vigor,
Full of
floating, unattached phrases, often out of position.
And worse
— the end of the sentence commonly forgets its beginning,
As if the
sentence were a long, weary road to the wrong place.
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Serious
writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than
journalists, though less interested in money.
George Orwell
All
writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives
there lies a mystery. 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. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes
a baby squall for attention.
George Orwell
Every
page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not
always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and
small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s
skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our
interest has everything to do with those choices.
Francine
Prose
A girl pushing a carpet sweeper
under my typewriter table has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken
my mind off my work, unless the girl was unusually pretty or unusually clumsy.
EB White
A writer who waits for ideal
conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.
EB White
There are very few thoughts or
concepts that can’t be put into plain English, provided anyone truly wants to
do it. But for everyone who strives for clarity and simplicity, there are three
who for one reason or another prefer to draw the clouds across the sky.
EB White
Often a word can be removed without destroying the
structure of a sentence, but that does not necessarily mean that the word is
needless or that the sentence has gained by its removal. If you were to put a
narrow construction on the word ‘needless,’ you would have to remove tens of
thousands of words from Shakespeare, who seldom said anything in six words that
could be said in twenty. Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey
into sound. How about ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’*? One tomorrow would
suffice, but it’s the other two that have made the thing immortal.
EB White
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| Susan Sontag |
The only story that seems worth
writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart.
Susan Sontag
Breathe
in experience, breathe out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
Writing
is only a substitute for living.
Florence Nightingale
