writing-process

Want to be a writer? take a good book a good pen and a notepad to bed with you every night of your life.

In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It__ written for writing__ sake, as if I were to say, __et me tell you I__ dying._ Well of course I am. So are you.

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.

So I suppose one danger is that we might get the idea that, you know, __o blurt, is to be._ The idea that whatever comes out is good and is us. Whereas someone who has really worked with text realizes _ well, that neither one is __eally_ you, but that the considered version might represent a __igher_ you _ brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder.

I'm really just playing when I write. I feel like I'm a kid again. I want my characters to do and say things like when I played with dolls!

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

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." - 1946

...there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...

The setting sun threatened to consume me__t could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.

For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You__e done the time but wonder if it__ going to satisfy the judge.

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?""Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day _ for a bit, anyhow.

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written

And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to gain entrance to their minds and feelings, to respect them for themselves as human individuals, and to portray them as truly as we can. The whole process of fiction is a mysterious one, and a writer, however experienced, remains in some ways a perpetual amateur, or perhaps a perpetual traveller, an explorer of those inner territories, those strange lands of the heart and spirit.

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he'd written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write