1) On the importance of reading to writing I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns…
1) A character must control his or her choices within the movie When I see scripts that aren’t working, it’s often because that character really has no agency. Has no real decision-making capability on what’s going to happen next. Either they’re always responding to what the villain is doing, or what other characters are sort…
1) The letter form is a good way to warm up I’ve found that the letter form is a good way to get me going. I write letters just to warm up. Some of them are just, “Fuck you, I wouldn’t sell that for a thousand dollars,” or something, “Eat shit and die,” and then…
1) When you’re ready to stop, stop For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented the facts and made the point that you want to make, look for the nearest exit. –William Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976) 2) Your…
By Ryszard Kapuscinski (An excerpt) Herodotus — who lived 2,500 years ago and left us his “History” — was the first reporter. He is the father, master and forerunner of a genre –reportage. Where does reportage come from? It has three sources, of which travel is the first. Not in the sense of a tourist…
1) On why humans seek out stories We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality. We do not wish to escape…
For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and especially, cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp. –Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer (2006) This sentence…
A little more than seven years ago, I wrote “travel stunt” essay — “Around the World in 80 Hours (of Travel TV)” — that recounted the experience of holing up in a Las Vegas hotel room for one week and spending all of my waking hours watching the Travel Channel. The experience was uniformly awful,…
Excuse me if I’m a little terse here. It’s not about travel. It’s about writing. If you want to publish stories, you have to think about readers first. Why should readers pay (or even take the time) to read your stories if the writing isn’t hard and sharp, instructive and edifying? So my advice would…
I try to discourage the preoccupation with “being a writer”. I don’t even let my students talk about it. The writing suffers under that kind of self-consciousness. I failed one student a Duke. His mother called me and said, “He doesn’t usually fail. He’s a good student, and he wants to be a writer.” I…
“I always want to remind people that the word fiction doesn’t come from some imaginary Latin verb meaning I make things up as I go along. It actually comes from a real Latin verb which means I give shape to. The essence of fiction is shaping, patterning, and plotting, using symbols, handling narrative, all those…
