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Jeffrey Archer (b. April 15): “There’s no substitute for reading great novelists.”

15 Apr

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Jeffrey Archer, born 15 April 1940, is an English author and former politician. His books, starting with Kane and Abel, have sold at least 250 million copies worldwide.

Jeffrey Archer’s top 10 writing tips:

  1. Make time. “Decide when you’re going to write. Don’t be casual and only do it as and when it suits you. Don’t think you can write a novel after you’ve done a hard day’s work, it’s insulting to those professional novelists who spend their time doing nothing else.” 
  2. Be disciplined. “For example, I write from 6-8am, 10-12am, 2-4pm, 6-8pm. I keep that routine up for 40-50 days and handwrite every word. I then take a break and go back to it again a month later.” 
  3. Write what you know. “Don’t do vampires, wizards or ghosts because they’re in fashion. Jane Austen wrote about family life in a small village and gave us six of the greatest novels ever written.” 
  4. Get some fresh air. “I go for two long walks between sessions, for two reasons, physical and mental. The plot will buzz around in your mind while you are walking, continually churning over, which it can’t be while you’re actually writing.” 
  5. Do several drafts. “Do not imagine that the first draft of your book is the one that will be published. My latest novel, The Sins of the Father, was 14 drafts and took approximately 1000 hours.” 
  6. Be flexible. “If you think of something better half-way through the writing process, don’t be frightened to go back and incorporate it or even change the story completely.” 
  7. Seek opinions from professionals. “When you want an opinion on what you consider the finished script, seek it from a professional editor, an agent or someone you don’t know, through a third party. Do not seek an opinion from your wife, husband, partner, mistress or close friend. They will lie.” 
  8. Read the greats. “There is no substitute for reading great novelists, and instead of just enjoying their craft, think carefully about how they’ve achieved it. Do they spend pages on description, do they move the story on quickly, how do they make you turn the page? It’s all there in front of you if you look carefully, so at least when you try to do it, you have analysed how successful authors have managed it in the past.” 
  9. Stay fit. “If the body is a physical wreck – too much drinking, smoking, late nights – how can you expect the written word to be anything less than drunken, useless and tired?” 
  10. Don’t give up. “My first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, was turned down by 14 publishers, ended up with an advance of £3,000 and on first printing took a year to sell 3,000 copies. It is still extremely rare for a first book to be a best-seller.”

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Not waiting for Godot any longer…

13 Apr

Samuel Beckett, author of Waiting for Godot, is now tired of waiting, and is coming to get Godot, and boy, is he going to get it!

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Eudora Welty (b. Apr 13): “If you haven’t surprised yourself, you haven’t written.”

13 Apr

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Eudora Welty (born 13 April 1909, died 23 July 2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

Quotes:

  1. Human life is fiction’s only theme.
  2. If you haven’t surprised yourself, you haven’t written.
  3. A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
  4. It doesn’t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
  5. Learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
  6. I’m a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
  7. Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
  8. It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. 
  9. Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
  10. Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

 

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Thomas Harris (b. April 11): “Fear comes with imagination…”

11 Apr

Thomas Harris, born 11 April 1940, is an American author and screenwriter. All of his works have been made into films, the most notable being the multi-Oscar winning The Silence of the Lambs.

Quotes on writing:

  1. Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.
  2. Problem solving is hunting. It is savage pleasure and we are born to it.
  3. Writing novels is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
  4. You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.
  5. The intimacy of the detail – why The Silence of the Lambs is quite possibly the Thriller Writer’s bible.

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Paul Theroux (b. April 10): “Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.”

10 Apr

Paul Theroux, born 10 April 1941, is an American travel writer and novelist. The Great Railway Bazaar is his most famous work of non-fiction. He is best known for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux.

Quotes on writing:

  1. Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
  2. Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
  3. The more you write, the more you’re capable of writing.
  4. A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
  5. You can’t write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.
  6. I’m constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
  7. Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
  8. I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
  9. Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
  10. I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive – no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
  11. Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial – but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
  12. Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

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Anne Lamott (b. April 10): “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.”

10 Apr

 

Anne Lamott, born 10 April 1954, is an American novelist and non-fiction writer. She is also a political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. Her non-fiction works are largely autobiographical and cover alcoholism, single motherhood, depression and Christianity. She is most famous for Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Quotes on Writing:

  1. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
  2. Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.
  3. I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good at it.
  4. Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
  5. You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
  6. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
  7. We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer’s job is to turn the unspeakable into words – not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.
  8. For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
  9. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
  10. You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

 

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Charles Jackson (b. April 6th): “The writer lives by biting the hand that feeds him.”

6 Apr

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Charles Jackson, born 6 April 1903 and died 21 September 1968, was an American author best known for his 1944 novel The Lost Weekend.

Quotes on writing:

  1. The writer knows his own worth, and to be overvalued can confuse and destroy him as an artist.
  2. The writer must essentially draw from life as he sees it, lives it, overhears it or steals it, and the truer the writer, perhaps the bigger the blackguard. He lives by biting the hand that feeds him.
  3. I know they’re always disappointed to meet a writer; they have some preconceived idea about you and expect you to be ‘interesting’ or intense or drunk or something different from just a normal average guy like anybody else.
  4. Like all his attempts at fiction it would be as personal as a letter – painful to those who knew him, of no interest to those who didn’t; precious or self-pitying in spots, in others too clever for its own good; so packed with Shakespeare that it looked as if he worked with a concordance in his lap; so narcissistic that its final effect would be that of the mirrored room which gives back the same image times without count.
  5. If you should decide that you didn’t like books written in the first person, or books about whaling, patricide, prostitution, war, wretched poverty, divorce, madness, adultery, homosexuality, cripples, or the most erotic kind of fornication for fornication’s sake, and thus rule them off your list, you’d be doing yourself out of some of the greatest works of literature in history – in fact, nearly all of them. What counts is what the writer brings to his story, not the subject itself.

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Milan Kundera (b. April 1st): “All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”

1 Apr

Milan Kundera, born 1 April 1929, is the Czech Republic’s most recognized living writer. He has lived in exile in France since 1975. Kundera’s best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been nominated on several occasions.

Quotes on writing:

  1. All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
  2. To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
  3. For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
  4. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
  5. Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
  6. The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

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Sean O’Casey (b. March 30): “Money doesn’t make you happy but it quiets the nerves.”

30 Mar

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Seán O’Casey (born 30 March 1880, died 18 September 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist who wrote about life in the slums of Dublin in plays like The Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars.

Quotes:

  1. Money doesn’t make you happy but it quiets the nerves.
  2. When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
  3. All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
  4. Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its ten thousands.
  5. Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
  6. Laughter is wine for the soul – laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness – the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.
  7. You can’t put a rope around the neck of an idea. You can’t put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets. You can’t confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.

 

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Paul Verlaine (b. March 30): “The poet is a madman lost in adventure.”

30 Mar

Paul Verlaine, born 30 March 1844 and died 8 January 1896, was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.

Writing quotes:

  1. The poet is a madman lost in adventure.
  2. I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.
  3. A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.

 

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