“The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.”

Alain de Botton

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition; it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward. Amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man — or this woman — may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for thirty years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

— Orhan Pamuk, from his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, December 2006 (via)

All this advice from senior writers to establish a discipline — always to get down a thousand words a day whatever one’s mood — I find an absurdly puritanical and impractical approach. Write, if you must, because you feel like writing, never because you ought to write.

— John Fowles (via Advice to Writers, where you’ll find lots more of this sort of thing)

Sometimes I think a writer should make up his mind whether he’s going to be a writer or a reader. There isn’t time for both.

— Jessamyn West (via The Paris Review).

That is exactly how I feel: can’t read when I’m writing, can’t write when I’m reading.

“Write about the thing that frightens you most.”

— Marsha Norman

To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new. Even Matisse painted some of his Fauvist pictures in anxiety. Maybe that helped him to simplify. Character, discipline, negative capability count. Write, complete, revise. If it doesn’t work, begin something else.

— Bernard Malamud (via Paris Review)

I spent ten years writing Oscar Wao, and I definitely didn’t spend the ten years being like, “I’m amazing! This has taken ten years because this much genius requires a decade!” [laughter] I spent the whole time, you know, fucked up, unhappy, really miserable and convinced that I’d ruined the whole thing, and all the stuff you get when you spend a really long time lost in the desert. I think more than anything, my basic lesson as an artist has been humility.… The crazy thing about the arts is it’s not like other stuff where you can build up muscle to help you with the next project. A friend of mine, he’s a surgeon, he’s like a combat surgeon in Iraq, and we grew up together and immigrated together, and he tells me every surgery makes you even more awesome for the next surgery. I’ve never felt that anything I’ve written has made me more awesome. So I think for me it’s going to be a struggle for whatever the next project is, and if you’re an artist and you work long enough at this, you begin to understand your rhythm, and what I’m beginning to understand is my rhythm is very slow. I felt like my first book was just an accident, but what I’m discovering now is that this is my rhythm. I take forever. Friends of mine hear this and they want to fucking throw themselves off a bridge, because the first ten years drove them crazy.… Melville wrote Moby-Dick — does anyone remember how many months it took him? Like fourteen months! Fuck you, Melville!

— Junot Díaz, interviewed by Dave Eggers in The Boston Review

“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

… when you write, you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, you know, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities, so on. You’re just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you. And somehow the physical act of doing it is the only way you have of having access to that self. When you’re not physically writing, you don’t have the key to that door. But when you get in — certainly speaking for me, when I get into a state of properly concentrated attention, then I think of that as my best self, the self that does that. I wish I had access to it the rest of the time.

— Salman Rushdie articulating a feeling that rings very true to me

“I think ‘taste’ is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”

— John Updike, Hugging the Shore

“A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That’s the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I’ll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with — who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog — to read my books.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.”

— Philip Roth

Before you sweat the logistics of focus: first, care. Care intensely.… Obsessing over the slipperiness of focus, bemoaning the volume of those devil “distractions,” and constantly reassessing which shiny new “system” might make your life suddenly seem more sensible — these are all terrifically useful warning flares that you may be suffering from a deeper, more fundamental problem…. Know in your heart that what you’re making or doing matters… First, care. Then, as you’ll happily and unavoidably discover, all that “focus” business has a peculiar way of taking care of itself.

— Merlin Mann

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”

— Saul Bellow (via)

“Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.”

— Alain de Botton

“It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.”

— Alain de Botton

“I don’t think of characters as people. I think of them as made objects of language. And their only purpose is to be pushed outward toward the reader.… There’s never a time in writing stories at which the characters do what some writers say, which is to take over from me and become the person who writes the story.… I’m unwilling not to be their author.

“I still don’t want to write a book just because I’ve done it for thirty years. I don’t want to write a book just because my last book had good luck. I would like to write a book for the reason that anybody ever writes a book the first time, for those sort of unassailable, unquestionable, high aspirations of wanting to make something good, something good that you can give to somebody else. Over time, you can get very confused about those goals.”

— Richard Ford, Stuff Magazine, September 1997

“The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we’re not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it’ll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us — we won’t stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn’t follow. The dynamic lives in the writer’s mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one.… Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”

— Don DeLillo, in a letter to Jonathan Franzen, around 1997

“Start out with an individual and you find that you have created a type — start out with a type and you find that you have created nothing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

— Gustave Flaubert

“When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page.”

— George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”

It is hard to imagine a living American novelist writing a passage like the last four paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, summoning up the “fresh, green breast of the new world.” American novelists by and large do not identify with ordinary Americans any longer, nor with the American dream (“the last and greatest of all human dreams”), but with their intellectual class — the people with whom they went to school, whose minds are furnished with the same authorities and assumptions, who share a similar understanding of the world.… And thus the American novel, once a lively voice in the national debate to specify the American idea, has devolved into the voice of a homogeneous intellectual class.

— D. G. Myers on what he has elsewhere called “the emergence of a literary generation whose experience is limited to creative writing.”

“I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. So, perhaps, on the whole I get my deserts, and something over — not a crowd, but a few I value more.”

— Robert Browning, letter, 1868

Myself, I’ve set up a second computer, devoid of internet, for my fiction-writing. That’s to say, I took an expensive Mac and turned it back into a typewriter. (You should imagine my computer set-up guy’s consternation when I insisted he drag the internet function out of the thing entirely. “I can just hide it from you,” he said. “No,” I told him, “I don’t want to know it’s in there somewhere.”)

— Jonathan Lethem (via)

And here I thought I was the only one going to such extremes.

“Hugger-mugger takes a lot of explaining, a lot of diagramming. An additional trouble with it, which keeps the suspense thriller, however skillful and polished, a subgenre, is that the novelist, manipulating his human counters on the board, must keep them somewhat blank, with selective disclosure of their inner lives, lest the killer or mole or whatever be prematurely unmasked.”

— John Updike, “Hugger-Mugger”, The New Yorker, 9.18.06, reviewing le Carré’s novel The Mission Song.

The more you know about a character, the less mystery remains. The less you know about a character, the less believably human he seems. In technical terms, literature requires “round” characters, mystery requires “flat” ones. The trick is to square that circle somehow.

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”

— William James

“A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay.”

— Saul Bellow, letter to Bernard Malamud (1953)

“The only mood in which to start writing is self-disgust. Writing becomes an act of atonement for procrastination — and ‘self-waste.’”

— Alain de Botton, master Twitterer

“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue…”

— Samuel Johnson, Rambler #106 (March 23, 1751) (source) (click that link at your peril — a fella could get lost in a place like that)

“The idea of authors competing with each other is strange, not strange on a worldly level, but on a psychic level. I have always seen myself as locked in competition with myself, my own doubts and hesitations, my own limitations, and like any working writer I live with a daily process of selecting and judging and discarding which is fiercer than anything that can happen in the outside world.”

— Hilary Mantel

Commandments

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it — but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

— Henry Miller, notebook, 1932-1933 (quoted in The Art & Craft of Novel Writing by Oakley Hall)

“One key element of a successful artist: ship. Get it out the door. Make things happen.

“The other: fail. Fail often. Dream big and don’t make it. Not every time, anyway.”

— Seth Godin

“Your future gets shorter, and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [my son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.”

— Cormac McCarthy, asked how aging has affected his work

I’m young yet, younger than McCarthy anyway, but I feel the same way. I don’t want to waste a single day on anything but work and my kids, as my vacation-deprived wife will confirm for you.

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, from an undated letter to his daughter Scottie, reprinted in The Crack-Up (1945)

“Like so many of the key skills of the writer’s life, the solution [to being distracted by the Internet] comes down to (groan) self-discipline. I came back resolved to break my habit of checking email and the Web (even to handle essential, chore-like tasks) whenever the urge strikes. I’ve converted to the ‘no email before noon’ productivity cult and save up any web-based activity for after I’ve done the day’s allotted reading and writing.…

“Now that I’m paying more attention to the insidious impulse to ‘take a little break,’ I see that it hits whenever I’m looking at a project that requires full and deep attention. I know that these projects are both more rewarding and more interesting that what people I barely know are posting on Twitter and Facebook, but trivia can be very seductive. Like potato chips, it’s hard to resist once you’ve allowed yourself ‘just a taste.’ You have to build yourself a cabin, not of logs but of hours, and not in the woods, but during some part of every day. And then you have to lock the door.”

— Laura Miller, Salon critic who retreated to “the fabled cabin in the woods to think, read and even write a bit,” safe from the maddening presence of “the biggest distractor in my life — the Internet.”

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said, ‘A faster horse.’”

— Henry Ford (via)

Follow your own vision. Do not write what you think readers want. They do not know what they want until you show it to them.

“I have to have something to do that engages me totally. Without that, life is hell for me. I can’t be idle and I don’t know what to do other than write. If I were afflicted with some illness that left me otherwise okay but stopped me writing, I’d go out of my mind. I don’t really have other interests. My interest is in solving the problems presented by writing a book. That’s what stops my brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow, obsessing about nothing. Some people do crossword puzzles to satisfy their need to keep the mind engaged. For me, the absolutely demanding mental test is the desire to get the work right. The crude cliché is that the writer is solving the problem of his life in his books. Not at all. What he’s doing is taking something that interests him in life and then solving the problem of the book, which is, How do you write about this? The engagement is with the problem that the book raises, not with the problems you borrow from living. Those aren’t solved — they are forgotten in the gigantic problem of finding a way of writing about them.”

— Philip Roth

“It is a very good plan every now and then to go away and have a little relaxation.… When you come back to the work your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgment.”

— Leonardo da Vinci