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Lee Smith (b. November 1): “We have to pay attention” & other quotes on writing

1 Nov
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Lee Smith, born 1 November 1944, is an American fiction author whose writing has won the O. Henry Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction.

Quotes on writing:

  1. I like books. I like to read for four hours at a stretch.
  2. If you’re writing, you’re always living your life in a very attentive manner, because you have to.
  3. The practice of writing itself is a way of staying in touch with the deeper, more meaningful self and the experience of writing.
  4. We have to pay attention. It’s a lifetime of paying attention and of listening and looking and seeing images and hearing stories and noticing things.
  5. When you’re just flat-out writing, it’s very much like prayer. You’re totally out of yourself, and you come back to yourself with this sort of feeling that you don’t get from anything else.
  6. I think writing has always had a powerful corrective influence and possibility. We have to write about what’s good, and we also have to write about parts of our culture that are not good, that are not working out. I think it takes a new eye.
  7. My advice for young writers is just do it. Don’t wait for some ideal point in your life when you will finally have “time to write.” No sane person ever has time to write. Don’t clean the bathroom, don’t paint the hall. Write. Claim your time. And remember that a writer is a person who is writing, not a person who is publishing.

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Evelyn Waugh (b. October 28): “An artist must be a reactionary” & other quotes on writing

28 Oct

waughEvelyn Waugh (born 28 October 1903, died 10 April 1966) was an English author, born into a family of publishers and writers. Waugh’s first book, A Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was published in 1928. Soon afterwards his first novel, Decline and Fall, appeared and his career was sensationally launched. Evelyn Waugh wrote 15 novels and several acclaimed travel books, two additional biographies, and an autobiography, A Little Learning. 

Quotes on writing:

  1. I put words down and push them around a bit.
  2. There are no poetic ideas, only poetic utterances.
  3. Some people think in pictures, some in ideas. I think entirely in words. 
  4. One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
  5. An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
  6. Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
  7. Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.
  8. I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
  9. I used to have a rule when I reviewed books as a young man: never to give an unfavorable notice to a book I hadn’t read. I find even this simple rule is flagrantly broken now. 
  10. Don’t analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

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Jonathan Stroud (b. October 27): “Try different kinds of writing” & other quotes

27 Oct

Jonathan Stroud, born 27 October 1970, is an author of fantasy books, mainly for children and young adults. He is best known for the Bartimaeus Trilogy.

Quotes on writing:

  1. Practise: Write as much and as often as possible.
  2. Read: As above, as much and as widely as you can.
  3. Experiment: Try as many different kinds of writing as you can.
  4. When I write something that would have made me laugh as a 10-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I’m onto something.
  5. When I was young, I kept a diary for about 10 years and I had to write in it every day. Even on days when nothing seemed to happen, I made myself think of something to put in it.
  6. The important thing about any book is that you have to have a good story and that it has to be exciting. Then it’s nice to add other levels underneath that people can pick up on.
  7. As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don’t like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.

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Marina Lewycka (b. October 12): “Comedy can expose the soul” & other quotes on writing

12 Oct

Marina Lewycka, born 12 October 1946, is a British novelist of Ukrainian origin. Her debut novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and short-listed for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Six quotes on writing:

  1. One of the nice things about being a writer is that no one recognizes you. 
  2. I’m a huge fan of Chaucer, he has the most wonderful characters, and I drew on him a lot for Two Caravans.
  3. My preferred place to write is in bed propped up with lots of cushions, and a nice pot of tea on a tray – but it can be hard on the back.
  4. I like to learn something as I write. I often start out with a subject I don’t know very much about and finding out more makes the process more interesting. 
  5. You think comedy isn’t serious, but with comedy you can say such a lot that serious can’t. Comedy can expose the depths of the soul; funny is what we are when we least intend to be.
  6. You must have a good story and find the right voice to tell it. Another useful tip is show, don’t tell. In other words, don’t write that a character behaved badly, show us their bad behavior instead.

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Harold Pinter (b. October 10): “Language is a trampoline” & other quotes on writing

10 Oct

Harold Pinter (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others’ works include The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Trial. 

Six quotes on writing:

  1. Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
  2. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
  3. I don’t give a damn what other people think. It’s entirely their own business. I’m not writing for other people.
  4. Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you … at any time.
  5. I’m not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically. And I’m not conscious of any particular social function. I write because I want to write. I don’t see any placards on myself, and I don’t carry any banners.
  6. I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

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Belva Plain (b. October 9): “Read the best there is and thereby learn.”

9 Oct
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Belva Plain (9 October 1915 – 12 October 2010) was an American author. Over 30 million copies of her novels were printed in 22 languages. 21 of her novels appeared on the New York Times best-seller list.

Six quotes about writing:

  1. I’m an early riser, and morning is my work time. I have a special workroom where no one interrupts me except my dog.
  2. I write in longhand on a yellow pad. I don’t use a computer because I like to take time to think about what I’m saying. 
  3. I think it’s as difficult for me to describe the process of inspiration as it would be for a composer to tell how a melody took shape in his/her head. 
  4. My advice to would-be writers? READ. Read the best there is and thereby learn. And keep trying. Writing isn’t easy. It’s very hard work, requiring a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.
  5. I wrote Evergreen because I had to. I had no real idea that it might be published. I know how competitive the world is and I didn’t want to become the sad victim of false hopes.
  6. I thought it was time to write about the kind of people I know. I got sick of reading the same old story, told by Jewish writers, of the same old stereotypes – the possessive mothers, the worn-out fathers, all the rest of the neurotic rebellious unhappy self-hating tribe. I wanted to write a different novel about Jews – and a truer one.

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Michael Korda (b. October 8): “Finish your first draft and then we’ll talk.”

8 Oct
Korda

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Michael Korda, born 8 October 1933, is an English-born writer and novelist who was editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster in New York City.

Quotes about writing:

  1. Finish your first draft and then we’ll talk.
  2. Ask a book publisher how many copies a book has sold, and he or she, presuming you’re not the author, will probably try to remember the size of the first printing, then double it. If you’re the author, the publisher will try to remember the number of copies that were shipped and cut that in half in order to avoid encouraging you to expect a big royalty check.
  3. Escapism sold books, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were sold by exposing America’s flaws and making the average American reader (and book club member) look closely at his or her most cherished social assumptions. Americans might not be eager to accept integration, feminism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and the drug culture – or to shoulder the blame for the existence of these problems – but they were certainly willing to read about them.

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D.H. Lawrence (b. September 11): “Tragedy is like strong acid…”

11 Sep

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“Tragedy is like strong acid – it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”

~ D.H. Lawrence. b. 11 September 1885

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There are three levels of readership…

6 Sep

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There seem to be three levels of readership: at the bottom, those who go after “human interest”; in the middle, the people who want ideas, packaged thought about Life and Truth; at the top, the proper readers, who go for style.

~ VLADIMIR NABOKOV

 

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Jeannette Winterson (b. August 27): 10 Rules for Writing

27 Aug

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Jeannette Winterson (b. 27 August 1959

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10 Rules for Writing

  1. Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
  2. Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
  3. Love what you do.
  4. Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are ­doing is no good, accept it.
  5. Don’t hold onto poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.
  6. Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect.
  7. Take no notice of anyone with a ­gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
  8. Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
  9. Trust your creativity.
  10. Enjoy this work!

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