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 send it off on the fax. I find the mood or the rhythm through letters, or sometimes either reading something or having something read— it’s just a matter of getting the music.
–Hunter S. Thompson Paris Review interview (2000)
2) A bad beginning is something to build on
I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me, the bad beginning is just something to build on. It’s no big deal. You have to give yourself permission to do that because you can’t expect to write regularly and always write well. That’s when people get into the habit of waiting for the good moments, and that is where I think writer’s block comes from. Like: It’s not happening. Well, maybe good writing isn’t happening, but let some bad writing happen. Let it happen!
–Jennifer Egan, Days of Yore interview, April 19, 2011
3) Use notecards to get outside your head
I write the “first draft” of an essay on 3×5 cards, typing sentences in no particular order, taking my own dictation. Throwing things down in a nonlinear fashion breaks habitual connections, tearing up those old agreements, and lets me think unlikely thoughts without worry or concern. The process itself carries a quotient of risk and gets me outside my head, but ultimately the discrete and confined space of a note card makes every sentence I write seem equally destined, a legitimate thing in its own right, free from any narrative intention I might have. Eventually I pin those cards to an actual (not virtual) corkboard and begin a search, not so much for order, but movement, ways to move from card to card.
–Charles D’Ambrosio, New Yorker interview, November 26, 2014
4) Learn to love the process
Creativity itself doesn’t care at all about results — the only thing it craves is the process. Learn to love the process and let whatever happens next happen, without fussing too much about it. Work like a monk, or a mule, or some other representative metaphor for diligence. Love the work. Destiny will do what it wants with you, regardless. Just love the work.
–Elizabeth Gilbert, BarnesAndNoble.com interview, Summer 2006
5) Scratch drafts are fodder for rewriting
Once when I was writing on a paper napkin, the waitress asked, “Do you write on napkins because it doesn’t count?” It had never occurred to me that writing on a napkin frees me up. If I pull out a tablet, I’m saying, “Now I’m writing,” and I become more conscious of being a writer. The waitress saw it; I didn’t recognize it, she did. That’s why I like to write on napkins. Then I go home to another kind of work—taking what I’ve written on napkins in bars and restaurants and typing it up, rewriting.
–August Wilson, Paris Review interview, August 1999
6) The confining act of writing makes ideas concrete
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible, that is, through the uncertainties of spelling, the occasional lapses, oversights, unchecked leaps of the word and the pen. Otherwise, what is outside of us should not insist on communicating through the word, spoken or written: let it send its messages by other paths.”
–Dubravka Ugresic, “These Infantile Times,” Kirkus, November 29, 2011
7) All good writing is initially hard to do
I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic. I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing Slouching Towards Bethlehem; the pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece. (I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but that would not be entirely true; I did have a deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain.)
–Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
8) If you get stuck, skip a section and move on
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
–John Steinbeck in Paris Review interview (1975)
9) Don’t hoard your best ideas; use them
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)
10) Most writing is done away from the desk
Each man has his own way. After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I’d say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you’re walking or shaving or playing a game or whatever, or even talking to someone you’re not vitally interested in. You’re working, your mind is working, on this problem in the back of your head. So, when you get to the machine it’s a mere matter of transfer.
–Henry Miller, Paris Review interview (1962)
11) Writing is an ongoing process of selection
Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.
–John McPhee, “The Art of Omission,” The New Yorker, September 14, 2015
12) The act of writing can lead to new ideas
The material begins to lead you in an unexpected direction, where you are more comfortable writing in a different tone. That’s normal—the act of writing generates some cluster of thoughts or memories that you didn’t anticipate. Don’t fight such a current if it feels right. Trust your material if it’s taking you into terrain you didn’t intend to enter but where the vibrations are good. Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach. Don’t ever become the prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints.
–William Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976)
13) To write is to try and make sense of the world
To write is to step away from the clamor of the world, to take a deep breath and then, slowly and often with shaking heart, to try to make sense of the bombardment of feelings, impressions, and experiences that every day and lifetime brings. The very act of putting them down—getting them out of the beehive of the head and onto the objective reality of paper—is a form of clarification. And as the words begin to take shape and make pairings across the page, gradually you can see what you thought, or discern a pattern in the random responses, so that finally, if all goes well, you’re convinced you’ve got something out of your system and into a domain where it creates a kind of order.
–Pico Iyer, “Writing Undoes Me,” Shambhala Sun, November 2005
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