on-writing

The good writing ideas don__ have to be about political turmoil, mass killings, capitalism, racism, injustice, etc. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart.

Tell a story in lesser and simpler words.

Writing a story is like going on a date__ou will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.

Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.

Don__ break the rules when you haven__ fully figured them out yet.

A book is not completed till it's read.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite__etting something down.

Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.

Don__ beat yourself up, son. I__ sure there is a culture on this spinning ball of dirt where you can be pretty. If not, do rock __ roll, or practice words. That shit__ pretty as well.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.

My best advice about writer__ block is: the reason you__e having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it__ the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from __riting well_ to __riting badly,_ you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don__ like to admit it, because we__e raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let__ just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that__ a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn__ going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it__ no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you__e an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team __ will one day write something good_ to team __ have no choice but to write a piece of shit_ and then take off your __ad writer_ hat and replace it with a __etty critic_ hat and go to town on that poor hack__ draft and that__ your second draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn__ make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.