Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
You must write every single day of your life … You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads … .may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation.
We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.
My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.
I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, “To hell with you.”
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Books aren’t written - they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Writing is trouble, make no mistake, for everyone involved, and who needs trouble? [But] … now and then lightning strikes, sometimes early in a writer’s life, sometimes late. The lightning follows no particular pattern - there’s no justice in it, of course. But for the lightning to strike at all, you have to stand out in the rain for a while, just stand there, while everyone around you is running for shelter.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.
A novel is, alas— for better or worse, a function of experience and maturity. Why are there almost no good novels written by people in their early twenties or in their teens? There are almost none. It’s one of the great problems of teaching writing to young people— you find talented young people, eighteen or nineteen years old; you try to teach them some skills; you try to teach them some awareness, some craft and discipline. But you are also aware that you’re getting them all dressed up with no place to go for about ten years, because they’ve got to wait until they’ve settled into their own characters and into their own lives, until they know something in their lives; and then their good fiction, their good narrative, will begin to come out of them in their middle and late twenties— I believe often not until their late thirties.
Book: Conversations: Reynolds Price and William Ray -The MVC Bulletin, Memphis State University, Memphis, Tennessee, 1976
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?