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Favorite Trivia – WRITING & WRITERS & EDITING
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| “I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material to me.”
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath |
“Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.” Philip Roth |
| “The work ethic is simple: I told myself a long time ago—if you don’t put your behind in that chair, you’ll have to put it in someone else’s chair. That settled that.”
Danielle Steel – Gratitude (Todd Aaron Jensen) |
| “You do not learn from work like yours as much as you learn from work unlike yours.”
Marvin Bell (Planet on the Table) |
| “. . . how I hated giving up time for lunch. So many ideas I had while I bolted my food, and so many of them must be lost.” [February 7, 1955]
Norman Mailer |
| “Doing prose is much easier on me; the concentration spreads out over a large area and doesn’t stand or fall on one day’s work, like a poem.” [March 12, 1962]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
| “Every experience is grist for a novelist.” [October 12, 1962]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
| The Feeding of the Muse . . . If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. . .
“To feed your muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. . . By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read, you have fed Your Most Original Self. By training yourself in writing, by repetitious exercise, imitation, good example, you have made a clean, well-lighted place to keep the Muse. . . You have learned to go immediately to the typewriter and preserve the inspiration for all time by putting it on paper.” Ray Bradbury – Zen in the Art of Writing |
| “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”
Samuel Johnson |
| “Meditated characters for Middlemarch. [July 22, 1869]
“I do not feel very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of Middlemarch. I have need to remember that other things which have been accomplished by me, were begun under the same cloud.” [Sept. 11, 1869] “Looking into accounts à propos of an offer from Blackwood for another ten years of Copyright I find that before last Xmas there had been distributed 24,577 copies of Middlemarch. Magnificat anima mea!” [Oct. 20, 1876] The Journals of George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston |
| “Life is too short to write long things.”
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec |
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“She [Flannery O’Connor] grew up in a small Southern town, she was very unusual—her claim to fame is that she taught a chicken to walk backward.” [see video footage above] Karin Slaughter – The Books That Changed My Life (ed. by Bethanne Patrick) |
| “I don’t mean that poetry must be such that the average man or woman can completely understand all its artistry, all its color, all its melody, and all its implications. I do mean that if a poem cannot convey some of these to the average consciousness, it isn’t poetry at all. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his brilliant lectures on literature to his Cambridge students remarked that there are two basic factors in writing. Expression and Impression. Expression is the pouring forth of the author’s ideas from his own mind. Impression—a much harder job—is getting those ideas into such form that those who read will understand what the author is trying to express.”
Berton Braley – The World’s 1000 Best Poems, Vol 1 |
| Words Not Capitalized in Title Case:
Articles (a, an, the), Coordinating Conjunctions (and, but, for), and Short (fewer than 4 letters) Prepositions (at, by, to, etc.).
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| “I am good for nothing but writing, am alive only when writing—I am a man-shaped heap of commas, exclamation points, lyric apostrophes, and metaphors.”
Richard Selzer – Diary |
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“When I say I must write, I don’t mean I must publish. There is a great difference. The important thing is the aesthetic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and as necessary for me . . . as the confession and absolution of a Catholic in church.” [January 25, 1956]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
| “Grandma talks about the life she led in Lomba and I get so envious of her! If they wanted to write they caught a goose, pulled out a wing-feather, and made a point at the end.” [October 11, 1893]
The Diary of “Helena Morley” – Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant |
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“As Mr. Kazin told me: ‘You don’t write to support yourself; you work to support your writing.” [October 25, 1954]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
| “A friend, who used to live in the same Manhattan apartment building as Kurt Vonnegut, insisted that everyone in New York was faking it to some extent or another.
He told me how he saw the author out walking one morning in his usual tattered clothes, his hair in its customary state of disarray. A homeless guy with an oversize backpack approached him and said, ‘Hey, watch my stuff while I go take a leak.’ When Vonnegut declined, the guy said, ‘Brother, people like us gotta look out for each other.’ Vonnegut looked surprised and amused, ‘I’m not homeless,’ he said.” J. Courtney Sullivan – “Keeping Up Appearances” (The Secret Currency of Love, ed. by Hilary Black) |
| “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
Stephen King |
| “You can teach people structure and how to write a lead. But you can’t teach them how to notice the right things.” [June 11, 1983]
Tina Brown – The Vanity Fair Diaries |
| “I began to notice the names of the pulp writers: John D. MacDonald, Frank Gruber, Cornell Woolrich. And I started copying paragraphs. . . as text blocks for my sample comic strips. But copying took too much time and I started writing my own texts. I liked inventing names and characters and plots (most of them out of the memory of the stories I’d read). The people did what I wanted them to do and said what I made them say. It was like a magic trick. In some ways, writing stories was easier than trying to do comics; I didn’t need to draw the details of a gun; I just had to say the word ‘gun.'”
Pete Hamill – A Drinking Life |
| “It’s funny how one always, somewhere, has the germ of reality in a story, no matter how fantastic. . . . it was a first step for me to a story where the protagonist isn’t always ME, and proved that I am beginning to use imagination to transform the actual incident. I was scared that would never happen, but I think it’s an indication that my perspective is broadening.” [June 12, 1952]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
| “I always have envied painters because they can work with the music turned up loud while I cannot write a word with Charlie Parker on. All of the painters who are friends of mine dance as they work. They stroke in time and review their progress with riffs in their mouths. Their work is action, music is action; action in sound integrates with action in color. I cannot do this. . . God, I envy painters.”
A.B. Spellman (Angels of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, ed. by Charles Henry Rowell) |
| “Editing can refine a work but cannot create it: the hand of the writer must be there first. Lydia Maria Child tells the reader just what her role as editor was. ‘Such changes as I have made, she wrote, ‘have been mainly for purposes of condensation and orderly arrangement.'” [Introduction by Walter Teller]
Linda Brent – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl |
| “How can you help but fill whole notebooks?… I must cover it all in this olio, everything human, Passion and prayer and fear, pleasure, distraction, and rage.” The First Satire: On this form of writing (The Satires of Juvenal – trans. by Rolfe Humphries) |
| “And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. . . Secondly, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that. Not write, for many of us, is to die. . .
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed. . . An hours writing is tonic. . . . “We use the grand and beautiful facts of existence in order to put up with the horrors that afflict us directly in our families and friends, or through the newspapers and T.V. The horrors are not to be denied. Who amongst us has not had a cancer-dead friend? Which family exists where some relative has not been killed or maimed by the automobile? Which means writing as cure. Not completely, of course. You never get over your parents in the hospital or your best love in the grave.” Ray Bradbury – Zen in the Art of Writing |
| “The practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind, but supply it, too.”
Strunk & White – Elements of Style |
| “I once took a course in short-story writing at New York University and during that course the editor of Collier’s talked to our class. He said he could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk every day, and after reading a few paragraphs, he could feel whether or not the author liked people. ‘If the author doesn’t like people,’ he said, ‘people won’t like his stories.'”
Dale Carnegie – How to Win Friends and Influence People |
| “Writing the story of your own life, I now know, is an agonizing experience, a bit like drilling your own teeth. At least fifty times in the past fifteen months I have wanted to throw these pages—or myself—out the window. But now that the book is finally finished, I realize that the experience was rewarding as well as painful, for it made me use muscles in my mind that I had never used before, and that is always thrilling. Forced to look intensely at the eighty years behind me, I have been amazed again and again to see patterns emerge and issues crystallize and relationships yield their significance in ways that were never quite clear while the events of those years were occurring. For that I’m grateful.”
Gloria Swanson – Forward to Swanson on Swanson |
| “Writers can handle fast rejection. But they cannot stand the slow no.” [January 28, 1984]
Tina Brown – The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 |
| “I was not sorry that he failed with periodical literature, for writing for reviews or newspapers is bad training for one who may aspire to write works of more permanent interest. A young writer should have more time for reflection than he can get as a contributor to the daily or even weekly press.”
Samuel Butler – The Way of All Flesh |
| “‘The art of memoir is really so much about what you leave out. There are a millions stories that you are going to leave on the wayside, really important ones, for the sake of the bigger story you want to tell. . .’ Of the subject matter, she says, ‘I was looking back and it was almost like I was writing about this little girl that I knew really, really well, but I could separate myself from her and her family. They began to feel like fictional characters to me in a very fond way.'”
Monica Wood – When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine (Melanie Brooks – Writing Hard Stories) |
| “His books are the only bone of contention between us. I want him to write like other people, and not to offend so many of his readers; he says he can no more change his manner of writing than the colour of his hair and that he must write as he does or not at all.”
Samuel Butler – The Way of All Flesh |
| “Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.” [Ad Atticum., IV, 8.]
Cicero |
| “…the Sublime, wherever it occurs, consists in a certain loftiness and excellence of language, and that it is by this, and this only, that the greatest poets and prose-writers have gained eminence, and won themselves a lasting place in the Temple of Fame. A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself. . . the Sublime, acting with an imperious and irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or no. Skill in invention, lucid arrangement and disposition of facts, are appreciated not by one passage, or by two, but gradually manifest themselves in the general structure of a work; but a sublime thought, if happily timed, illumines an entire subject with the vividness of a lightning-flash, and exhibits the whole power of the orator in a moment of time.”
Longinus – On The Sublime |
| “I had to console Henry for his one failure: the American book. His worst book. I hope it is the deadly effect of America on him and not the disintegration I have seen take place now in every artist around me who has abandoned himself to his every whim, lack of discipline, fancy, dadaism, instinct, negativism, that falling apart of the self-indulgent, the liberated unconscious, the loss of contact with human reality.” [January 8, 1942]
Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1947, edited by Paul Herron |
| “Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!”
Luigi Pirandello |
| “George has returned this evening from a week’s visit at Vernon Hill. On coming upstairs he said, ‘I have some very pretty news for you—something in my pocket!’ I was at a loss to conjecture, and thought confusedly of possible opinions from admiring readers, when he drew the ‘Times’ from his pocket; today’s number containing a review of the ‘Scenes of Clerical Life.’ He happened to ask a gentleman in the railway carriage coming up to London to allow him a look at the ‘Times,’ and felt quite agitated and tremulous when his eyes alighted on the review. Finding he had time to go into town before the train started, he bought a copy there. It is a highly favourable notice, and as far as it goes, appreciatory. . .
“There were some pleasant scraps of admiration also gathered for me at Vernon Hill. Doyle happening to mention the treatment of children in the stories, Helps, said, ‘O, he is a great writer!’. . . “I wonder how I shall feel about these little details ten years hence, if I am alive. At present I value them as grounds for hoping that my writing may succeed and so give value to my life—as indications that I can touch the hearts of my fellow men, and so sprinkle some precious grain as the result of the long years in which I have been inert and suffering. But at present fear and trembling still predominate over hope.” [Jan. 2, 1858] The Journals of George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston |
| “Both writing and therapy are ways we interact with—and interpret—our past; both may play a role in helping us make sense of and/or recover from traumatic events. The major difference is that the sole purpose of therapy is to advance our recovery, while writing artfully for an audience requires we make sense of our lives in a way that speaks to others. While therapy helps deepen our understanding of our lives, writing sharpens our senses so that images and details from the past emerge in a new context, one that illuminates events for ourselves as well as for our readers. . .
“Memoir writing, gathering words onto pieces of paper, helps me shape my life to a manageable size. By discovering plot, arc, theme, and metaphor, I offer my life an organization, a frame, which would be otherwise unseen, unknown. Memoir creates a narrative, a life story. Writing my life is a gift I give to myself. To write is to be constantly reborn. On one page I understand this about myself. On the next page, I understand that.” Sue William Silverman – Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir |
| “i have, as far as i can recollect, never written a single line when i wasn’t well, physically, all this healthiness gives you a sense of being on top of things which you need if you are to write, you have to write from the top downwards, you have to sit above your subject. Of course, conversely, this kind of well-being more or less sets in when i sit down at the table with the typewriter.” [25 dec 52]
Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1934-1955 |
| “I’ve found that such is the task of a writer: to help others understand and empathize with a life experience they’ve never lived. Work hard at empathy, and two things will happen: First, you will feel better about your experience. Second, you will find that you’re not so alone after all, and that there’s always somewhere to turn to, even if it’s just the blank page and the blinking cursor. I don’t want constant, unwavering happiness. Now, I want perspective.” [April 28, 2016]
Mallory Smith – Salt In My Soul: An Unfinished Life |
| “I have been so happy today! For a story came to me beautifully complete. I wrote the end of it early in the day, and shall do the first half tomorrow. It’s the only way one should write stories. I never can rest until I get the climax off my mind.” [February 15, 1924]
Winifred Willis – New York Diaries |
| “I think the purpose of writing—and, really, with all comedy—is to fully entertain yourself… Do your best to entertain yourself. Or entertaining the fifteen-year-old in you. Or just creating something that you want to see exist. Find a way to remove that anxiety and pressure. Just do your best, the same way that you would try to do your best with anything, like making spaghetti. Basically, I think life is way more knuckle-headed than people make it out to be. It’s making spaghetti, and then it’s sitting with someone and having spaghetti. That’s basically all life is.”
Dave Hill (Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers – Mike Sacks) |
| “I have great curiosity—a writer must have curiosity. He must think there is more to find out. I am always on the lookout for the unexpected.”
Esther Harriott – Writers and Age: Essays on and Interviews with Five Authors |
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Tenjin – Japanese God of scholars and poets.
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| “As for Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, I continue to be astonished by his mastery of language, his flamboyant style, his unerring and novel imagery. And I continue to be nonplussed by his egregious love of depravity and violence for its own sake. What a waste! All that great gift laid at the feet of cruelty. The necrophiliac scenes—just the idea of there being more than one!—are so disturbing as to be unforgettable. . . McCarthy could have been the finest writer of our time, no question, but after all, this is literary jerking off. Sorry, I can’t genuflect before this guy.”
Richard Selzer – Diary |
| “A writer should aim at pleasing, not the multitude, but a small circle of good critics. If he wins their approval, he may bid the cheap teachers of the lecture-room go hang!” [Satires, I, X.]
Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough |
| “Despite its widespread public influence [Brother, I’m Drying], Danticat has not lost ownership of the personal story enveloped in her memoir’s pages. ‘This is a sliver of the story. If I told every single thing, it would be like War and Peace, so there’s still plenty left over for me. There are plenty of private moments that are mine. . .’
‘In terms of your process, it’s important to know that it’s doable,’ she tells me, her contagious optimism flowing through her words. ‘It’s survivable. It’s actually even helpful, because once you have the story wrapped up somewhere, you can dip in anytime. It’s like a treasure chest with little pieces you can go in and look at, and step out.'” Edwidge Danticat – Brother, I’m Dying (Melanie Brooks – Writing Hard Stories) |
| “An hour before deadline, after I’d written a story about the eviction of a family in Brooklyn, Sann [Paul] called me over. He held the galley in his hand. . . ‘Not bad,’ he said. . . Then he pointed at a paragraph near the end. ‘You see this,’ he said, ‘where you say this is a tragedy?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I’m taking it out. And don’t you ever use the fucking word tragedy again. You tell what happened, and let the reader say it’s a tragedy. If you’re crying, the reader won’t.'”
Pete Hamill – A Drinking Life |
| “I’ve found that writing is a lot like making homemade bread. I combine my subject with a few basic ingredients like strong action verbs and relevant facts. Then I knead my manuscript, pulling words around, discarding useless phrases and revising until I get the right texture. I let the text sit and rise, then punch it down to alter sentence structure until I get the right shape. After my dough has risen to its fullest potential, I slide my polished article into a hot oven.
When my masterpiece is baked I give a final critique, checking its appearance and texture. With confidence I serve my chef d’oeuvre to a targeted editor, trusting that the tantalizing aroma will generate another sale. My blue ribbon moment is seeing my published document in print.” Dorcas Annette Walker – Bylines 2010 Writer’s Desk Calendar |
| George Orwell’s Writing Tips
(from his 1948 essay “Politics and the English Language”) —Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. —Never use a long word where a short one will do. —If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. —Never use the passive where you can use the active. —Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. —Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. The Book Lover’s Miscellany – Claire Cock-Starkey |
| “I looked through Libération’s questionnaire of two years ago: Pour quoi écrivez-vous?. . . very few writers claimed financial necessity as a reason for exercising their profession. . . The more scrupulous did not hesitate to admit that their principal satisfaction was in feeling that they were leaving a part of themselves behind—in other words, writing was felt to confer a certain minimal immortality. This would have been understandable earlier in the century when it was assumed that life on the planet would continue indefinitely. Now that the prognosis is doubtful, the desire to leave a trace behind seems absurd.” [September 14, 1987]
Paul Bowles – Journal, Tangier (1987-1988) |
| First woman to win a Pulitzer Prize: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 1921. |
| “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'”
Hilaire Belloc |
| “The author of ‘Pickwick Papers’ [Charles Dickens] is a small, bright-eyed, intelligent-looking fellow, thirty years of age, somewhat of a dandy in his dress, with ‘rings and things and fine array,’ brisk in his manner and of a lively conversation. If he does not get his little head turned by all this, I shall wonder at it. Mrs. Dickens is a little, fat, English-looking woman, of an agreeable countenance, and, I should think, a ‘nice person'” [February 15, 1842]
Philip Hone |
| “If with water you fill up your glasses, you’ll never write anything wise; for wine is the horse of Parnassus, which hurries a bard to the skies.”
Thomas Moore – Anacreontic |
| Kurt Vonnegut’s Tips on Writing a Short Story
—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 heck 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. The Book Lover’s Miscellany – Claire Cock-Starkey |
| “I rewrite in order to be reread.”
Andre Gide |
| “In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination. . . The facts of imaginative literature are as hard as the stone Dr. Johnson kicked. We must always take the novelist’s and the playwright’s and the poet’s word, just as we are almost always free to doubt the biographers’ or the autobiographer’s or the historian’s or the journalist’s. In imaginative literature we are constrained from considering alternative scenarios—there are none. This is the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.”
Janet Malcolm – The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes |
| “According to Ruth [Bader Ginsburg], Nabokov changed the way she read and wrote: ‘He used words to paint pictures. Even today, when I read, I notice with pleasure when an author has chosen a particular word, a particular place, for the picture it will convey to the reader.’ Ruth remembers Nabokov as a great showman and a spellbinding teacher, and recounted how his wife, Vera, would sit in the back of the third-floor lecture hall with its tall wooden doors and shake her head when he said something particularly outrageous. Ruth, whose judicial and scholarly writing is distinctively concise and well crafted, credits Nabokov: ‘I try to give people the picture in not too many words, and I strive to find the right words.'”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg – My Own Words |
| “The only reason I go out is observation greed. Churning through the cast of New York society, I see it as the ever-moving slipstream of a novel.”
Tina Brown – The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 |
| “I think I suffered more from the reviews of The Naked and the Dead than any other of my books. . . I’d never dream, however, of not reading reviews. It would be like not looking at a naked woman if she happens to be standing in front of her open window. Whether ugly or lovely, she is undeniably interesting under such circumstances.”
Norman Mailer – The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |
| “English A at Harvard in 1939 put its emphasis on teaching a student to write tolerably well. . . . The first stricture of the course was a wise one: Writing is an extension of speech, we were told. So we were instructed to write with something of the ease with which we might speak, and that is a good rule for beginners. In time it can be absorbed, taken for granted, and finally disobeyed. The best writing comes, obviously, out of a precision we do not and dare not employ when we speak, yet such writing still has the ring of speech. It is a style, in short, that can take you a life to achieve.”
Norman Mailer – The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |
| “Best way to begin [to write a book] is with notebook or diary. Blindfold the computer; send the phone for a walk in the park. Alone with pen or pencil on paper, try to find words for something that in the previous 48 hours prompted your notice. . . The object is to show, not tell, to recall the detail at the heart of the matter—the turn of the woman’s head, the torn hem of her dress. The breed, size or sound of the dog, the strain on its leash. Does the chicken scurry or strut? Was the child looking at, through or around you….” (see full article here)
Lewis H. Lapham |
| “On the 20th of January I received the following letter from Dickens. ‘My dear Sir, I have been so strongly affected by the two first tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me through Messrs. Blackwood, that I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration of their extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos of those stories, I have never seen the like of. . . I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seem to me such womanly touches in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began. You will not suppose that I have any vulgar wish to fathom your secret. I mention the point as one of great interest to me—not of mere curiosity. If it should ever suit your convenience and inclination to show me the face of the man or woman who has written so charmingly, it will be a very memorable occasion to me. . .’” [January 20, 1858]
The Journals of George Eliot |
| “Mrs. Glyn (author of Three Weeks) admitted that she was often faced with the alternative of becoming a prostitute with her body or her books. She chose the pen.”
Cecil Beaton (Introduction of Three Weeks) |
| “There’s a relationship between the great poems of the world and the great screenplays: they both deal in compact images. If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.”
Ray Bradbury – Zen in the Art of Writing |
| Twelve Ways To Write Even Gooder – Frank L. Visco
1. Speaking of homonyms, avoid non sequiturs. 2. A polysyllabic vocabulary is unnecessary. 3. Don’t verb nouns. 4. You can’t be too ambiguous. 5. Beware of typographical eras. 6. Don’t use non-existent words, irregardless. 7. Emulate common parlance. Eight: BE CONSISTENT!!! 9. But without sentence fragments. 10. . . . don’t change sources in midstream-of-consciousness . . . 11. Statistics are 100% useless. 12. There are exceptions to every rule, except this one. 13. Don’t overdeliver.” |
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“The most difficult choice I have ever had to make happened today. Editor Weeks on the Atlantic sent me a letter with a $25 check for your favorite ‘Circus in Three Rings,’ BUT with a really thorny string attached. They liked the second stanza much better than the first and third and challenged me to do a revision around the second stanza with a new title (suggested by them), ‘Lion Tamer’ . . . “I just can’t tailor-make it over again. Another poem, yes, but the dangers of contrivance, of lack of spontaneity, are legion if I revised this. I’d have to live with it the year out and still I’m afraid the revision would sound artificial. I did resent this attempt at butchering to fit their idea of it. Prose, I wouldn’t mind, but a poem is like a rare little watch: alter the delicate juxtaposition of cogs, and it just may not tick. So I think I’ll sleep on it the weekend out, and if a revision comes, I’ll send it, but I doubt it.” [April 21, 1955] “I just got a wonderful letter from Editor Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly after my first exam of three (fours hours long) this morning. He said they all agreed with me that my original poem ‘Circus in Three Rings’ was better than the revision they asked for and so it will definitely appear in the August issue of the Atlantic as you read it and liked it—what good fortune for the title poem of my embryonic book!” [May 21, 1955]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
| “‘I have no gift for the epic,’ says Horace, ‘and yet I must write, and must write satire, even as Lucilius used to do. I belong to a frontier stock but am armed for defence, not offence, using the pen when attacked as naturally as the bull its horns.’ . . .
“To be brief—whether peaceful age awaits me, or Death hovers round with sable wings, rich or poor, in Rome, or, if chance so bid, in exile, whatever the colour of my life, write I must.” [Satires, II, I.]
Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough |
| “I feel that the final purpose of art is to intensify—even, if necessary, to exacerbate—the moral consciousness of people. In particular, I think the novel at its best is the most moral of the art forms. You are exploring the interstices of human behavior—which is the first approach to religious experience for many of us, especially since the organized religions don’t begin to offer sufficient account of the terrible complexities of moral experience and its dark sibling, moral ambiguity. The wisest rule of thumb for the would-be moralist is: There are no answers. There are only questions.”
Norman Mailer – The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |
| “Writing is the ultimate recycling project. Everything I have ever experienced, every book I’ve read, every journal entry I’ve penned, every conversation I’ve had, every essay I’ve graded, every class and vacation I’ve taken, every obsession I’ve gone through—it all returns in my writing. Not only do those experiences give me ideas for essays and articles, but they provide the foundation of knowledge that underlies my work.”
Kathryn Wilkens (Bylines: 2007 Writer’s Desk Calendar) |
| “The novel as the dominant—nay, supreme—medium of literary expression is doomed, sunk, toast, and has been for decades. . . The novel’s historical moment has passed, that cultural centrality has given way to cultural marginality. We want to believe that the art forms of our time are the art forms of all times, and it simply isn’t so. Just think, five hundred years ago lyric poetry was the hot thing, what all the pale-faced, dreamy-eyed young men were doing. . .
“The possibilities of any form are finite; they get exhausted. . . The fractured nature of modern life—the manic pace, the near constant interruptions. The novel—mediative, leisurely, requiring long stretches of concentration—couldn’t answer the needs of the reader as it once did. “So where to go from there? Where to go if fiction, if story, seemed not like a link between our inner selves and the outer world, but like a falsehood or trick? Why, to fact, of course, otherwise known as nonfiction, where story wasn’t story at all, it was a thing that actually happened. “Which is the place it’s been since Norman Mailer, in 1960, in the pages of Esquire magazine, wrote the following line: ‘I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that was one of the great lies of all time.’ “New Journalism and the personal essay (not quite interchangeable, but close) had arrived. . . Fiction has always treated real people and true events as raw material and fair game. Engaged in what the impish and perverse [Janet] Malcolm called ‘Promethean theft, of transgression in the service of creativity, of stealing as the foundation of making.’ Used nonfiction for its own ends, in essence. With New Journalism, the using would be the other way around. Now nonfiction would avail itself of fiction’s techniques: the reporter would become a character in the story he was reporting on; the reporting of the story would become part of the story itself; the old unobtrusive no-style style was out, a stylish style, whistles and bells, in; subjectivity would, as Mailer decreed, reign supreme; dialogue would play a crucial role, livening up the narrative, goosing it along; and details and timelines would be elided and condensed to avoid redundancies or losses of momentum. . . “And now for a final twist: the New Journalism short writing was the new short story, and the New Journalism extended writing was the new novel. Fiction has, as I said, traditionally ripped off fact. Yet facts are inanimate. Imagination, in both fiction and nonfiction, is what sparks them, brings them to life. Nonfiction, therefore, is doing the same job as the form considered its antithesis. The novel didn’t die, it just found a different host to inhabit.” Lili Anolik – Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. |
| “Oh yes! believe me, you must draw your pen Not once or twice, but o’er and o’er again Through what you’ve written, if you would entice The man that reads you once to read you twice.” Horace |
| “My letter is longer than usual, because I hadn’t the time to make it shorter.”
Blaise Pascal – Lettres Provinciales, 16 |
| “Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince the reader that he is there, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events.”
Ray Bradbury – Zen in the Art of Writing |
| “[James] Joyce paid me 250 francs for about 15 hrs. work on his proofs. . . He then supplemented it with an old overcoat and 5 ties! I did not refuse. It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt.”
Samuel Beckett (Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore – Terry Newman) |
| “It’s been almost a year now since I’ve composed a short story or a poem, I who always thought of myself as a writer, all tortured and intense. I can just manage this journal. . . Basically, good writing is intensity, pitch, sex. Raymond Carver used to say that sometimes, when he was deep into a poem, he would look down to find his hand cupping his balls.” [February 4, 1989]
Lauren Slater – Prozac Diary |
| “Week after week in Jim [Krusoe’s] Monday night class, I began to learn about creative writing. He gave prompts for in-class assignments that were often whacky. Write about something completely unexpected in a room, like a car behind a couch. A pool in the kitchen. Include sentences that have the following number of words. One. Twenty. Ninety-eight words. Four. . . He was expert at creating a sense of discovery and adventure within the process of writing. There were no rules. The point was not to write a prize-winning story. Or even a linear one. The point was to find something new, surprising, and then turn it on its ear. Again.”
Lee Montgomery (A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors – Annie Liontas & Jeff Parker) |
| “I attempted to leave Raiatea on a thirty-six ton schooner. One of the crew was an old Swede who had come to the islands with the crew of [Robert Louis] Stevenson’s yacht, the Casco. He told how Stevenson, after writing all day, would read to the crew at night everything he had written.”
Maud Parrish – Nine Pounds of Luggage |
| “Part of the art of being a novelist is to play that delicate game of obtaining experience without falsifying it by the act of observation. . . Ideally, you are there to bring wealth to others. Wealth of observation, of perception, the riches of a philosophical attitude that is to a degree new, insights into psychology the reader hasn’t had before—all these are on the selfless side of writing. On the other hand, there is ego, vanity, and need—desire, finally, to advance oneself as a writer. . . . it’s perilous to fall in love with what you’re doing. You lose your judgment. And for the simplest reason—the words, as you are writing them, stir up your feelings too much. Odds are, if they excite you disproportionately, they may do much less to others.”
Norman Mailer – The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |
| “I want information. An author looking for a story can be like a junky looking for a fix. . . I can’t stand another year of writer’s block, sitting at a desk, staring out the window, waiting for something resembling insight to arrive like a packet in the mail.”
Stephen Elliott – The Adderall Diaries |
| “Hence it is not enough to make your hearer grin with laughter—though even in that there is some merit. You need terseness, that the thought may run on, and not become entangled in verbiage that weighs upon wearied ears. You also need a style, now grave now gay, in keeping with the role, now of orator or poet, at times of the wit, who holds his strength in check and husbands it with wisdom. Jesting oft cuts hard knots more forcefully and effectively than gravity.” [Satire, I, X]
Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough |
| “. . . refraining from writing myself, I will teach the art to others, even as a whetstone can sharpen knives, though it cannot cut. The first essential is wisdom. This you can cultivate by study of the philosophers, and when you have first learned from them valuable lessons of life, you should apply yourself to life itself, and then your personages will speak like real living beings . . . Poetry aims at both instruction and pleasure. In your didactic passages, be not long-winded; in your fiction, avoid extravagance. Combine the utile with the dulce, for only thus will you produce a book that will sell, and enjoy a wide and lasting fame.” [Ars Poetica]
Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough |
| “He [author’s father] offers to help with my memoir; he probably remembers things better than I do. I tell him he doesn’t even remember how many high schools I went to. And anyway, the memories are the point. What we remember, and how we order and interpret what we believe to be true, are what shapes who we are.”
Stephen Elliott – The Adderall Diaries |
| “Hollywood’s Eve isn’t a biography—at least not in the traditional sense . . . Here’s what Hollywood’s Eve is: a biography in the non-traditional sense; a case history as well as a cultural; a critical appreciation; a sociological study; a psychological commentary; a noir-style mystery; a memoir in disguise; and a philosophical investigation as contrary, speculative, and unresolved as its subject. Here’s what Hollywood’s Eve is above all else: a love story. The lover, me. The love object, Eve Babitz, the louche, wayward, headlong, hidden genius of Los Angeles.”
Lili Anolik – Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. |
| “Letters are the great fixative of experience. Time erodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. They are the fossils of feeling. This is why biographers prize them so: they are biography’s only conduit to unmediated experience. Everything else the biographer touches is stale, hashed over, told and retold, dubious, unauthentic, suspect. Only when he reads a subject’s letters does the biographer feel he has come fully into his presence, and only when he quotes from the letters does he share with his readers his sense of life retrieved. And he shares something else: the feeling of transgression that comes from reading letters not meant for one’s eyes. He allows the reader to be a voyeur with him, to eavesdrop with him, to rifle desk drawers, to take what doesn’t belong to him. The feeling is not entirely pleasurable. The act of snooping carries with it a certain discomfort and unease: one would not like to have this happen to oneself. When we are dead, we want to be remembered on our own terms, not on those of someone who has our most intimate, unconsidered, embarrassing letters in hand and proposes to read out loud from them to the world.”
Janet Malcolm – The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes |
| “Words are flighty. But once set down, utterances give form to life, celebrate pleasure, focus pain. Every writer wields a knife sharp with danger. Nothing’s safe. When offered up to clarity, memory acquires mysterious power. With each i dotted and each crossed t, intimate histories appear.” Winged Words (stanza 4) – Rachel Hadas |
| Excerpts from “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits”
1.Take notes regularly. This will sharpen both your powers of observation and your expressive ability. A productive feedback loop is established: through the habit of taking notes, you will inevitably come to observe more; observing more, you will have more to note down. . . —Observe your own activity. . . —Observe your own feelings (but not at tiresome length). . . —Observe the behavior of others, both animal and human. . . —Observe the weather, and be specific. . . —Note facts. . . —Note technical/historical facts. . . On the subject of taking notes, I want to add one last thing, and that is about public transportation: I do a lot of writing and note-taking on trips; in airports, on airplanes, on trains. I recommend taking public transportation whenever possible. There are many good reasons to do this (one’s carbon footprint—on the ground, in any case—ones’ safety, productive use of time, support of public transportation, etc.), but for a writer, here are two in particular: (1) you will write a good deal more waiting for a bus or sitting on a train than you will driving a car, or as a passenger in a car; and (2) you will be thrown in with strangers—people not of your choosing. . . 3. Be mostly self-taught. There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you. I have found that pursuing my own interests in various directions and to various sources of information can take me on fantastic adventures. . . 7. An advantage of revising constantly, regardless of whether you’re ever going to do anything more with what you’ve written, is that you practice, constantly, reading with fresh eyes, reading as the person coming fresh to this, never having seen it before. This is a very important skill to develop, and one that probably develops only with time and practice. . . Another way to see your work freshly is to leave it alone and come back to it after time has passed. . . 9. Go to primary sources and go to the great works to learn technique. This was the advice of Matsuo Bashōo, the seventeenth-century Japanese master of the haiku. Read the best writers. Maybe it would help to set a goal of one classic per year at least. Classics have stood the test of time, as we say. Keep Trying them; if you don’t like them at first, come back to them. . . 10. How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time. . . 11. Other books to have on hand: Books of writing exercises, if you find them useful. One I like is Brian Kiteley’s The 3 A.M. Epiphany. He has not only exercises to do but also little stories of his own experiences to go with them. . . 12. Important practical tip: After a session of writing, leave some clear time in which you can note down what your brain will continue to offer you. In other words, do not go directly from writing to lunch with friends or to a class. Do not go straight to your emails or your phone. Leave at least fifteen minutes completely open. Do the dishes or take a walk or a shower—do something physical in which you can remain open to your random thoughts. Your brain will offer you a few more good ideas during this time. Don’t lose them by silencing them with other activities. . . 13. If you want to be original, don’t labor to be original. . . If you want to be original, cultivate yourself, enrich your mind, develop your empathy, your understanding of other human beings, and then, when you come to write, say what you think and feel, what you are moved to say. . . 16. Work on your expertise with the technical aspects of writing English. . . Read books about language, and about style: most highly recommended of all is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. . . 17. Learn as much as you can, as often as possible, about the origins of the words you’re using. You will use them more accurately, and it is also interesting. . . Words that appear, or are, abstract almost always have at their origins something concrete. . . Know what that concrete thing is. Your use of the abstract word will then be more accurate. . . 19. Be sure to read poetry, regularly, whether you are a poet or a writer of prose. I hope, of course, that if you’re a poet, you are already reading a lot of poetry. You will not develop as a writer, if you don’t read. You won’t write as well, if you’re a prose writer, if you don’t read poetry. . . 20. Be curious—be curious about as much as possible. Think, generally, about how curious you are, or are not, as a person. If you are not very curious, think about why not. And try to cultivate curiosity. If you are curious, you will learn things, and the more curious you are, the more you will learn. . . 21. . . . free yourself of your device, for at least certain hours of the day—or at the very least, one hour. Learn to be alone, all alone, without people and without a device that is turned on. . . 22. . . . saying less rather than more, which sometimes means cutting some of what you have, can be very effective: for one thing, it speeds up the pace of the writing a little; for another, the more explanation you cut, the more active the reader’s mind has to be, making connections. The more active the reader’s mind, the happier the reader is, usually. That’s why we like jokes, or one reason why—because the joke happens in our minds; we the listeners are the ones who make the connection. . . 24. Keep in touch with the physical world. . . Use the five senses in your writing if you want the physical world to be more a part of it: consider sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. . . 26. . . . about dialogue. Listen to people talking and copy down the choicer bits of what you hear. Copy phrases, sentences. In this way, you will learn how people really speak. We don’t usually speak very coherently or neatly. We are often very brief in our exchanges. We often communicate in sentence fragments—that is, when we’re not being overly long, stumbly and messy, as we grope to express what we mean. Your dialogue should reflect how we speak, though it will often be notched up a degree or two in order to be more intense, more colorful, and more dramatic. But above all, dialogue should not consist entirely of neat, complete sentences. . . 28. Learn at least one foreign language in your life, either on your own (it can be enjoyable) or in a class; read regularly in that foreign language; it will give you perspective on English and teach you more about English; and it will develop your mind and character. . .” Lydia Davis – Essays One |
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Freytag’s Pyramid
Gustav Freytag, the 19th Century German playwright and novelist, drew a simple triangle to represent dramatic structure and highlighted seven parts he considered necessary to storytelling: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement (French for “the ending”). 7 elements of dramatic structure in Freytag’s Pyramid:
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Elizabeth Chey – Clearvoice.com
