Why We Write
Edited by Meredith Maran
Isabel Allende
p5 Reading in English, living in English, has taught me to make language as beautiful as possible, but precise. Excessive adjectives, excessive description--skip it, it's unnecessary...Just use one good noun instead of three adjectives.
p7 There is certain charm in what is spontaneous.
p10 Writing is always giving some sort of order to the chaos of life. It organizes life and memory.
David Baldacci
p17 When I go out and talk to school kids, I tell them, "All of you are amazingly creative, whether you know it or not. It's adulthood that beats it out of you. If you never lose that, you can go places no one's imagination has ever taken them."
p22 If writing ever becomes a job for me--if I start thinking I'd rather be out playing tennis, so I start taking shortcuts, doing it this time the same way I did it last time--I'll hang it up.
p23 Whether you're writing a novel or a cover letter to a potential agent, shorter is always better. Remember what Abraham Lincoln said, paraphrasing Pascal: "I'm sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have time to write a short one."
Jennifer Egan
p35 Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do. If what you really love to read is y, it might be hard for you to write x.
Exercising is a good analogy for writing. If you're not used to exercising you want to avoid it forever. If you're used to it, it feels uncomfortable and strange not to. Not matter where you are in your writing career, the same is true for writing. Even fifteen minutes a day will keep you in the habit.
James Frey
p41 Moving to Paris was about searching and looking and living and trying to become a writer and trying to figure out what that meant, if it was even possible. To live boldly, recklessly, stupidly, and beautifully.
Sue Grafton
p58 There are no secrets and there are no shortcuts. As an aspiring writer, what you need to know is that learning to write is self-taught, and learning to write well takes years.
Banging out a single book, then thinking you're ready to give up your day job and be a full-time writer, is the equivalent of learning to play "Three Blind Mice" on the piano and expecting to be nooked into Carnegie Hall.
Sara Gruen
p68 Planning and plotting and research are all fine. But don't just think about writing. Write!
Kathryn Harrison
p79 We all know talented people who piss their lives away, and dogged souls who show up even when they're uninspired, even when they've lost faith in their work. It's good to have talent and discipline, but there's really no substitute for self-discipline.
Don't portray yourself as who you want to be. Portray yourself as who you are.
Gish Jen
p85 Today I realize that this didn't happen to everyone, but in 1977 I didn't know enough about the world to be amazed. It was as if someone had said, "I know this apartment you can rent"--something helpful, that's all.
나도 그랬다. 그때 받았던 그 도움들이 얼마나 큰 감사함이었는지.. 그때 경험했던 모든 것들이 얼마나 대단한 것들이었는지..
p91 Writing is a ridiculous thing to do for money. If you do it, do it for the reason writers have always done it, which is not money but for another, deeper satisfaction.
Readers are interested in what's going on in other parts of the world, because what's going on in other parts of the world is relevant to what's going on here. Writing with an international viewpoint is important.
Sebastian Junger
p98 I just had this idea that if you jump off a cliff, you learn to fly.
p104 Write for yourself, not for a "market." You can't predict which of your works will connect with the most readers. Some of my best work sold the worst, and vice versa.
You can't be sloppy about the images you use. If you settle for "the rain hammered down" (which is probably a sentence I've written somewhere or other), it's dead writing. You have to push yourself to think profoundly and imaginatively about what something looks like, what is sounds like, what it feels like. You have to push yourself to find powerful, original ways of describing things.
Mary Karr
p114 The quote I had tacked to my board while I was writing Lit is from Samuel Beckett, and it's really helpful: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better."
Michael Lewis
p120 "Do it another ten years, then you can be a writer." Wall Street who were ten years older than me, and I didn't see anyone who could have left. You get trapped by the money. Something dies inside. It's very hard to preserve the quality in a kid that makes him jump out of a high-paying job to go write a book. It gets squeezed out of you.
Armistead Maupin
p137 Remember to play when you're working. It's easy to get lost in the drudgery, but good things can happen when you're being silly.
Writers' conferences are festivals of envy and contempt--dangling nerve ends all over the place. Stay away from them. The same goes for panels.
Terry McMillan
p143 From that day forward, if a leaf fell off of a tree, I thought, there's a poem in that. I was just a little poem writing fool.
Susan Orlean
P174 I had gone to the interview for the job with no clips, no experience, but a lot of passion; in fact I basically announced, “You just have to hire me. This is all I want to do. Just this.” … I think my pure desire made up for my complete lack of knowledge and experience.
P175 Even after my first book came out, he was still suggesting that it wasn’t too late to go to law school as a fallback. I said, “Dad, I don’t plan to fall back.” If I’d had a fallback I might not have toughed this out and made it work.
P181 I think the content is more important than the context…it’s not all about the packaging surrounding the story: my pride is about the story itself.
p181 You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.
You should read as much as possible. That's the best way to learn how to write.
You have to appreciate the spiritual component of having an opportunity to do something as wondrous as writing. You should be practical and smart and you should have a good agent and you should work really, really hard. But you should also be filled with awe and gratitude about this amazing way to be in the world.
Jodi Picoult
P202 Write even when you don’t feel like writing. There is no muse. It’s hard work. You can always edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank page.
Jane Smiley
P201 I believe that you either love the work or the rewards. Life is a lot easier if you love the work.
P215 Don’t write a book you think a publisher will want to publish. Write the book you want to research and the book you want to read.
