writing-craft

Don__ 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.

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

You don__ create a diamond by rubbing it with fluffy bunny slippers. You need to apply pressure and heat. There are enough air-headed cheerleaders out there. We need more drill sergeants.

Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with genuine confidence, and empty arrogance with artistry.

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

It's good to write badly. Things can only get better.

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we__e thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System--the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!

A writer must expect other people to criticize their work and open-mindedly consider all worthwhile suggestions. Martial arts master Bruce Lee advised anyone attempting to master a difficult enterprise to learn from other people but also liberally experiment and judiciously draw from our own well of intelligence and talent. __dapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

For me, not knowing your theme until your finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe _ there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there__ a high chance it won__ work.

You write what you know, and I know rock and roll.

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra__hey__l take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I__ too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I__ syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

Most__ut not all__f the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn__ want to be anyone__ employee if it interfered with their writing. They were halfway or all the way outside the mainstream and were often not interested in becoming part of the burgeoning corporate society. They had more freedom than your average American.

There__ a difference between the __rt_ of writing and the __raft_ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.

Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.

If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can't make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more. One other thing, quality comes with practice. If you are prolific, then you become a better writer because you are writing. The more you do anything the better at it you will become. So in a way, quantity does add to quality.