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Len Levinson's General Writing Considerations
Compiled by Len Levinson
Below is the essence of everything I've learned about writing, after writing 83 published novels and lots of reading. All unattributed items are by me.
The writer's primary task is to attract and hold the reader's attention from first sentence to last. This might seem obvious but many writers cannot grasp and execute the concept.
Good writing is clear communication. This also should be obvious but many writers cannot grasp and execute the concept.
If you want to take a creative writing course, study the masters such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Balzac, Proust, Stendhal, Turgenev, Flaubert, Celine, Mann, Colette, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Saul Bellow, Somerset Maugham, Anita Brookner, etc. I don't believe anyone can become a writer without reading substantially first. Study how the great ones set scenes, introduce characters, keep their plots moving, and transition from scene to scene. Most of what I've learned about writing came from reading.
"... however great a man's natural talents may be, the art of writing cannot be learnt all at once." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788) Genevan writer and philosopher
"One must at least begin by having some respect for the mediocre, and know that it already means something, and is reached only with great difficulty." - Vincent Van Gogh speaking of painting but applicable also to writing
"First of all you must get a clear idea of what you want to write. If you’re blocked, back up and think about what you want to write." - Sidney Sheldon (1917 2007)
"The beginning is the most important part of the work." - Plato (approximately 428-348 BCE) Greek philosopher and writer
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” - Louis L'Amour
"[...] writers seem to do better when they enrich what is known to them from personal experience with their imagination, instead of attempting to chart a largely unknown social and human landscape, or one they know only from secondary sources. It is one of the paradoxes of producing memorable and enduring fiction that it must have profound, if implicit, roots in closely apprehended social and human realities from which the creative imagination can take flight." Ross Douthat (1979-)
"... in the labor of composition, do not burden your mind with too much at once; do not exact from yourself at one effort of excogitation, propriety of thought and elegance of expression. Invent first, and then embellish. The production of something, where nothing was before, is an act of greater energy than the expansion or decoration of the thing produced. Set down diligently your thoughts as they rise in the first words that occur; and when you have matter, you will easily give it form; nor, perhaps will this method be always necessary; for by habit, your thoughts and diction will flow together." - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
"The single virtue required of a fiction writer [...] is mastery of the craft: plot and character and point of view, scene and setting and atmosphere. When these are properly apportioned and integrated - with no hectoring message or false sympathy - the result is an artistic whole that redounds to the good of both God and man." - Ralph C. Wood characterizing the viewpoint of Flannery O'Connor
Write from your depths and don't misapprehend your duty. Your only duty is to be interesting.
Imagination is the name of the game.
Deep meditation also is the name of the game.
"Art is the play of alternatives, of yin and yang." - William Kotzwinkle
"The transition to higher levels of writing is an act of self-reflection. Mirror your higher interests." - William Kotzwinkle
"The reader's mind is free fluid, hardly bound at all, and we must appeal to its great mercurial flow, not holding it back with our dull steps." - William Kotzwinkle (1938-)
"The image needs no commentary." William Kotzwinkle
No false notes. No dead wood. No vague attitudinizing. Don't gild the lily. Don't explain the obvious. Every sentence must maintain the story’s momentum.
Watch out for the flourish on the flourish.
"In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design." - EdgarAllan Poe (1809-1849)
"Don't tell the reader anything he already knows." Elmore Leonard (1925-2013). In other words: don't state the obvious.
“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.” - Voltaire (1694-1778) French writer
"Remember accurately." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
"[...] find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
"I believe in stripping away details that are unnecessary or distracting to an audience. Big sets and fancy costumes are so frequently beautiful by themselves that they cause filmgoers to lose sight of the story and people." - Nicholas Ray speaking of filmmaking but also applicable to writing fiction
"It is not unnatural that the best writers are liars. A major part of their trade is to lie or invent ... They often lie unconsciously and then remember their lies with deep remorse." - Ernest Hemingway
"The karma of laziness is failure, and the karma of activity is success.” - William Kotzwinkle
"You'll never figure out the mystery of your life. I advise you to spend as much time as possible in productive effort. - William Kotzwinkle
“Diligence is the mother of good fortune." - Miguel de Cervantes
"Pluck up your courage, and work! It is in work that you will find dignity, strength, I would go almost so far as to say happiness." - Victor Hugo’s advice to a young writer
"Caress the detail, the divine detail." - Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
"You can only express things properly by details. When you've observed a detail, you must discover the detail of the detail." - Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) Lithuanian-Polish writer
"Dark and light playfulness - that's all the better books have." - William Kotzwinkle. (1938-)
"Show all facets of every character and dilemma, but don't kill drama with constant over-elaboration and repetition. - Allow the work to be subtle." - William Kotzwinkle
"If you spell every beat of the ominous - it's less ominous. Less is more." - William Kotzwinkle
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” - Stephen King
"I am beginning to feel that a man can write too much about his own feelings, even when `what he felt like' is the nucleus of his narrative." - Siegfried Sassoon. (1886-1967) British writer
"Be regular and orderly in your life - like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer
"Art must do more than merely express the artist's feelings. Art must also have the capacity to heal." - Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) Russian poet and essayist
"If two men are having a conversation, and a bomb explodes under the table, that’s merely a shock. But if the audience sees the bomb being planted, and is counting the final seconds while those in the film talk on, oblivious, then that's suspense." - Alfred Hitchcock
Language is the means, not the end. Essentially, writing fiction is dreaming.
Writing well is the best revenge.
"There are three ways of making them (written works) better; -putting out, adding, or correcting." - Samuel Johnson
"I never revise but in the interest of a more passionate syntax." - William Butler Yeats to John Berryman
"It's not the writing - it’s the rewriting." - Ernest Hemingway ((1899-1961) American writer
"Movies aren't made; they're remade." - Irving Thalberg on movies but applicable to novels
"[...] there is no play in the world that cannot be improved by additional work." - George S. Kaufmann (1889-1961) American playwright, also applicable to novel-writing
"Easy writing makes hard reading." - Henry James (1843-1916) American writer
Vary the intensity of sentences, as a boxer varies the intensity of punches.
Writing is like French cooking. Reduce everything to its essence, then add a little sauce.
"People always say `Write what you know.' That's bad advice. You should write what you love to read. You have a Ph.D. in that genre." - Brad Thor (1969 -) American writer
"[...] you can't condemn artifice without dismissing the whole of art.” - Patrick White
"When a man begins to lust after the Muse instead of loving her, he may be sure that it is never the Muse that he embraces." - James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) American writer
"He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning." - Samuel Johnson
Writing is like music. Listen to the rhythms.
"Let your ear be your guide." - William F. Buckley
"[...] excellence in writing depends less on following rules than on ‘ear,’ the sense of what sounds right." Joan Acocella (1945-) American journalist/critic commenting on pv of E.B. White
"Swift writing, with fewer words, is successful only if it's grammatical." - William Kotzwinkle
"Correct usage is a premise for moral clarity and honesty." - Claudio Magris
"I believe language to have been given us to make our meaning clear." - Charlotte Brontë
"[H.W.] Fowler's true subject, however - his heart's home - is a set of two general principles, clarity and unpretentiousness, that he felt should govern all use of language." - Joan Acocella (1945-) American journalist/critic
"Clarity of thought will normally produce clarity of style; obscurity of thought will produce obscurity of style.” - Bernard Lewis (1916-) British-American historian
Obscurity is not profundity.
"No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place." - Isaac Babel (1894-1940) Russian writer
"Give the reader the luxury of not knowing what's going to happen next. He'll read onward in order to find out." - William Kotzwinkle
"The principal requirement of narration is that the plot offer alternatives with a certain frequency, and these alternatives cannot be predetermined. The reader must not know exactly what decision a character will make.” - Umberto Eco (1932-) Italian writer
Don't forget smells, tastes, visions, sounds.
Fiction isn't a movie. You needn't show every movement and twitch. Fiction is the realm of inner mind, the second level of reflection. - Bill Kotzwinkle
Contrasts, always contrasts. Where does her shadow fall?
Characters can't wander through a novel without doing something interesting.
"When stuck in dialogue, consult your notes for phrases you've heard people use." - William Kotzwinkle
Go beyond the obvious. Explore darkness, magic and dreams.
Harold Ross, founding editor of THE NEW YORKER, handed down the rule about 50 years ago that - nothing is “indescribable”.
"It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them. What chance is there that any book will make its way among that multitude? And the successful books are but the successes of a season. Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey." - W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British writer
"Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama. When they were abandoned as untenable superstitions, art sank into melancholy." - Mark Rothko
Create dynamic transitions.
"Intersperse touches from any part of the world: weather, horses, smell of the hay, rats, the things that are around, a thousand old barns he'd been in before. Conceptualize these elements while writing. You'll fill holes more creatively with a stronger, broader, concept field." - William Kotzwinkle
"No Hollywood flick, no movie of any provenance, can ever provide an experience of the battle of Borodino as intense as that provided in Tolstoy’s pages. Descriptive language supplies deeper penetration, attaches itself to the rods and cones of interior perception to a greater degree than a recovered or remembered image. Language is the process that lashes experience to the intellect." - Robert Stone (1937-) American writer
Follow the radiance through your imagination.
"When stuck, ask yourself: What's the play here?" - William Kotzwinkle
Every scene or sequence should end with a punch line of some sort.
The villain propels the plot. The hero is a zero until the dastardly deed goes down.
The hero can't cast too wide a shadow.
Behind every writing obstacle awaits an illumination. Play at writing, don’t work at it. Let writing give purpose to your life. If you get stuck, dig deeper. Concentrate on writing well and feed the writer in you.
"[...] the things that wear you down are also the things that nurture your talent." - Philip Roth (1933-) American writer
Exploit every scene and human interaction for all they're worth. Be detached, but never completely. Look for humor in every situation.
"[...] impropriety is the soul of wit." - W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British writer
"Good taste is the enemy of comedy." - Mel Brooks (1926-) American screenwriter, film director, producer, comedian, actor
Nothing bad ever happens to a writer. It's all material.
“Show nothing to anyone before publication. One hears more unfounded criticism than useful advice.” - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian writer-
”One of the dirty little secrets of art is that sometimes the worst social and political conditions prove the most fertile ground for its growth.” - Joseph Epstein (1937-) American writer p43
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Leonardo da Vinci p15
“The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, the hero I have tried to reproduce in all his beauty, who always has been, is and always will be admirable, is the truth.” Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian writer
“[...] without feeling one cannot write anything decent.” - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian writer
“Our profession is dreadful, writing corrupts the soul. Every author is surrounded by an aura of adulation which he nurses so assiduously that he cannot begin to judge his own worth or see when it starts to decline.” - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian writer
“Writing is easy. The hard thing is not to write.” - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian writer p343
”Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” - David Lynch (1946-), American film director, longtime meditator in THE WEEK 4/18/2014 p21
“I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.” - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian writer
“A drama is not meant to tell us a man's whole life, but to place him in a situation and tie up his destiny in such a way that his entire being will be clear from the manner in which he unties the knot.” - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian writer
A famous writer, I think it was William Somerset Maugham, defined the novel as "a prose work of some length that has something wrong with it."
The novelist needs "a richer and more general truth than the truth of observation." - Victor Serge
"Fiction is the lie we tell to get to the truth." - Albert Camus (1913-1960) French writer
"It is because we've had such great writers in the past, that a writer is driven far past where he can go." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) American writer
"I have always believed that the public had the right to ask authors to go to the limits of their powers, and that's a requirement to which, for my part, I try to submit myself." - Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) French writer
"American artists of all classes are doddered with theories, they read and think too much, they see and feel too little." - Walt Whitman (1819-1892) American writer
"Some of us scribblers, My Dear Sir, always have a certain something unmanageable in us, that bids us to do this or that and be done it must - hit or miss." - Herman Melville (1819-1891) American writer
Self-deception is the occupational hazard of writers.
"There is no such thing as a `writing talent.' Anyone can be taught to write a good sentence. What writers are born with is a `third ear,' not for words but for human nature." - Florence King (1936-) American Writer
"Only see that you have succeeded in saying exactly what you want to say - without showing off; with utter brave sincerity - and you will have achieved style because you will have been yourself." - Seepersad Naipaul (1906-1953) Indo-Trinidadian writer’s advice to his son V.S. Naipaul (1932-) who later won a Nobel.
"[...] style is ultimately vision." - Andre Aciman (1951-) Egyptian-American writer/professor
"To have style is to be original." - Joseph Epstein (1937-) American writer
" ... the uncaring unconscious quality ... that only a real style has." - Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) American writer
"[...] what makes the style is not what you play but how you play it." - Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) American musician speaking of music but applicable to writing
"Man and writer were the same person. But that is a writer's greatest discovery. It took time - and how much writing! - to arrive at that synthesis." V.S. Naipaul. (1932-) Indo-Trinidadian-British writer
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from “The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000” by Martin Amis (1949-) British writer
No writer can determine what may appeal to his imagination, and it is simply philistine to arraign him for the things he happens to write about best.” - Martin Amis (1949-) British writer p74
It should be clear that the more superbly an author throws away the crutches of verisimilitude, the more heavily he must lean on his own style and wit.
Experimental novels may have a habit of looking easy (certainly easier to write than to read), but their failure rate is alarmingly high - approaching, I sometimes fear, 100 per cent. - p95 Martin Amis (1949-) British writer
”Genre fiction is, very broadly, idea fiction, and what distinguishes it from the mainstream is for the most part a question of pace.” - p132 Martin Amis (1949-) British writer
The good is gone, the bad is all to come: this theme is as old as literature. p201
[...] as any novelist knows, compared to the other exertions of fiction, the demands of dialogue are negligible. - p255
[...] the important distinction between brilliance and dazzle. - p344
The crucial defect is [...] dullness. - p369
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"A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great." Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) American poet
"Writing good poetry is only occasionally difficult. Usually it is impossible." - Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) American poet
"The world is neither white nor black - it is grey .... The poets of our century seem incurably one-sided: either they write exclusively about pagodas and hermits' caves and sunsets, or else they write exclusively about ‘rats' alley' and prostitutes and dust-bins. We do not want a ‘new romanticism’ or a ‘new classicism’ - we want a new humanism, and we want it desperately." - Dennis Joseph Enright (1920-2002) British writer
"My verses may be elegant and genteel, but my heart is incorrigibly vulgar." - Pushkin
"Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you." - Colette
"A true artist must engage with dark forces [...]." - Garrison Keillor
"To be a traitor is every writer's destiny." - Dany Laferriere
"Parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) American writer
"Writing is like fishing in the deep. You don't know what you'll catch." - William Kotzwinkle
"Writing a novel is a little like putting a message into a bottle and flinging it into the sea." Graham Greene
"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public." - Winston Churchill (1874-1965) British writer/politician
"Fiction should be ten times more real than reality." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) American writer
"Exaggeration is the secret of both great art and great philosophy." - William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Irish poet
"To illustrate a principle, you must exaggerate much and you must omit much." - Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) British writer
"A writer may have his name all over the newspapers and yet be uncertain where the next check is coming from." - Anthony Powell (1905-2000) British writer
"Hemingway's dialogue at its best is a brilliant representation of `naturalism', not necessarily `how people really talk’”. - Anthony Powell (1905-2000) British writer
"... dialogue in a novel as in a play should be a form of action." - Graham Greene
"Writing is governed more than anything else by the spirit of the age.” Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) British writer
"We agreed that the only thing one wanted to do as a writer was to succeed in conveying a sense of reality." - Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) British writer mentioning Anthony Powell (1905-2000) British writer
"You just want to try and write as well as you can. It is above all a question of instinct." - Anthony Powell (1905-2000) British writer
"[...] the more one writes, the more one feels that the material largely controls itself." - Anthony Powell (1905-2000) British writer
"In general, he [Anthony Powell] thought it was important for writers to keep the literary world at a distance for as long as possible, otherwise you become assimilated and end up writing about it, which you don't want to do." - Michael Barber
“Make the reader laugh, and he will think you a trivial fellow. But bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.” - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British writer
“[Anthony Powell] thought grammarians like Fowler had too much say in the way people wrote." - Michael Barber
"Novelists, he [Powell] would say, ‘are much more like each other than they're like people who don't write novels'". - Michael Barber
"Regarding writing:.[…] there's no magic formula, just bloody hard work. You do it over and over again until you're satisfied." - Anthony Powell (1905-2000) British writer
"[...] writers disclose more about themselves in fiction than in autobiographies." - Anthony Powell (1905-2000) British writer
"[...] it is very hard to be a gentleman and a writer […]" - W. Somerset Maugham
"[Anthony] Powell used to say that while writing was never easy, the alternative, not writing, was far, far worse." - Michael Barber
“The thing that counts in writing is staying power. It's that, more than anything, that gives you a reputation." - Anthony Powell (1905-2000) British writer
"The muses put obstacles in our paths to fortify our muscles for the steep upward climb toward success." - Andres Segovia (1893-1987) Spanish Classical guitarist
"Romanticism comes from the fear of looking directly into the face of truth." - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian writer
"It's not nice, but it's art, and art isn't nice." - Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) German playwright
"The longer I live, the more I become convinced that the only thing that matters in literature is the magic of a book." - Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1997) Russian writer
”[Creating Art] is not an aesthetic process; it is a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires." Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Spanish painter speaking of painting but also applicable to writing
"Atmosphere is everything in a story." - H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) American writer
"Action is character." - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) American writer
[To develop a character]: "A physical trait is taken here, a habit of speech, an anecdote - they are boiled up in the kitchen of the unconscious and emerge unrecognizable even to the cook in most cases." - Graham Greene (1904-1991) British writer
"The more the author knows of his own character, the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in." - Graham Greene (1904-1991) British writer
The sad truth is that a story hasn't room for more than a limited number of created characters.” - Graham Greene (1904-1991) British writer
"[Orson] Welles understood that even the most unsympathetic character must demonstrate some humanity to maintain our interest." - Irving Metzman (1943-) American actor/director
"Disperse yourself into everything and your characters will come alive, and instead of the eternal declamatory personality, [...] your work will be crowded with human faces." Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer
We exist as writers, [Witold Gombrowicz] believed, in order to win readers to our side, to seduce, charm and possess them, not in the name of some higher purpose, but to assert our very existence. (WG was a Polish writer 1904-1969. I forgot to write down the name of the critic who made the statement.)
"... all our intellectual activity, in whatever field it takes place, is an attempt to give a meaning to our experience." - Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) American writer
"The career of writing has its own curious forms of hell." - Graham Greene (1904-1991) British writer
"... it is often easier to describe something from a long way off." - Graham Greene
"To a novelist his novel is the only reality and his only responsibility." - Graham Greene (1904-1991) British writer
"A writer's temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair." - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) American writer
"[...] a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise." - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (1964-) Spanish writer
"Writing a novel does not become easier with practice." - Graham Greene
"I couldn't help smiling when I thought of all the readers who have asked me why I sometimes write thrillers, as though a writer chooses his subject instead of the subject choosing him. Our whole planet since the war (World War II) has swung into the fog-belt of melodrama […]." - Graham Greene (1904-1991) British writer
"It is for the act of creation that one lives." - Graham Greene - (1904-1991) British writer
"Success is more dangerous than failure (the ripples break over a wider coast line)." - Graham Greene
"... a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels, and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood." - Graham Greene (1904-1991) British writer
"Writing is a form of therapy, and sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation." - Graham Greene (1904-1991) British writer
"A writer must write. Writing is oxygen; a real writer is driven to write as long as it is mentally and physically possible." - Florence King.(1936-) American writer
"Man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." - W.H. Auden
"You must never when you write a novel include something which has happened to you without in some way changing it." - Mario Soldati (1906-1999) Italian writer and film director speaking to Graham Greene ((1904-1991) British writer
"Dramatize! Dramatize!" - Henry James (1843-1916) American writer
"A writer of the largest dimension can alter the nerves and marrow of a nation." - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer
"He is content to be a fool half the time, if that's the price of being more than a fool the other half." - literary critic Richard Poirer on Norman Mailer
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from THE SPOOKY ART: SOME THOUGHTS ON WRITING by Norman Mailer
“Writing is spooky. There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the blank page each morning, and you never know where your words are coming from, those divine words.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer from the book jacket
”I do not think novelists - good novelists, that is - are altogether like other people.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer pxi
“Young people who write well are not just reasonably sensitive; they are over-sensitive.” - p12
”It's not advisable for a novelist, once he is successful, to live in an upper-class social milieu for too long. Since it is a world of rigid rules, you cannot be yourself.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p62
[Lenny’s comment: All social milieus have rigid unwritten rules. Snobbery among the upper classes seems preferable to getting stabbed, punched or shot among the lower classes.]
“Style is half of a novel.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p64
”Experience, when it cannot be communicated to another, must wither within and be worse than lost.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p68
“If you find some theme that keeps you working, don't question it.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p98
”No matter what you find yourself writing about, if it's giving you enough energy to continue, then the work bears a profound relationship to you at that point and you don't question it.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p98
“You cannot have a great democracy without great writers.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p160
”Writers aren't taken seriously anymore, and a large part of the blame must go to the writers of my generation, most certainly including myself. We haven’t written the books that should have been written. We've spent too much time exploring ourselves.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p163
”I was bothered in those years - the late Fifties - at how people were so ready to welcome the art of the absurd. I detest this art.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p165
I think that the inner sanction that artists give themselves is that they’ve got to be selfish - absolutely! - or nothing will get done. - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p170
[...] it is best to revere painters, poets, and novelists for their talent rather than their character. - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p170
Writing is of use to the psyche only if the writer discovers something he did not know he knew in the act itself of writing. That is why a few men will go through hell in order to keep writing - Joyce and Proust, for example. Being a writer can save one from insanity or cancer. - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p183
”The long-term tendency [of reporters] is to deaden future history into a gargantuan fact machine. One reason it would be dreadful if the novel died is that it is one of the few forms of Western civilization that attempts to deal with the notion of whole experience.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p187
”The act of writing is a mystery, and the more you labor at it, the more you become aware after a lifetime of such activity that it is not answers which are being offered so much as a greater appreciation of the literary mysteries.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p237
“When the novel is dead, then the technological society will be totally upon us.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p239
“After all, we do not write to recapture an experience; we write to come as close to it as we can.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p269
“Yet whoever believes [...] a man cannot write of a woman's soul, or a white man of a black man, does not believe in literature itself.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer - p282
”[Jonathan] Franzen writes superbly well sentence for sentence, and yet one is not happy with the achievement. It is too full of language, even as the nouveaux riches are too full of money. He is exceptionally intelligent, but like a polymath, he lives much of the time in Wonkville Hollow, for Franzen is an intellectual dredging machine.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p294
Camp is the art which evolved out of the bankruptcy of the novel of manners. p303
”Let us never assume there is not more and more, and more and more, and then more to write about - yes, we are the philosophers who are there to make sense of those concentrated if frozen fantasies we pretend to call facts.[...] How much fear this arouses in us, and on rare splendid days, what exaltation.” - Norman Mailer (1923-2007) American writer p308
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"[...] a great writer is like a second government." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) Russian writer
"The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature, as in a perpetual orgy." - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer
"The only way of not being unhappy is to lock yourself in the tower of Art and dismiss the rest as worthless." - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer
"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money." - Moliere (1622-1673) French writer
"Poets, as a class, are business men." - P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) British writer
"Real writers always write for money, you blockhead." - spoken by the character Giacomo Casanova in the novel CASANOVA IN BOLZANO by Sandor Marai - (1890-1989) Hungarian writer
"Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skillful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetizing." - spoken by the character Jasper Milvain in NEW GRUB STREET by George Gissing (1857-1903) British writer
"Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man isn't a first-rate writer, nothing can help it much." - William Faulkner (1897-1962) American writer
"The only one who can destroy a really strong and talented writer is himself." - Truman Capote (1924-1984) American writer
"[...] all writing is a campaign against clichés. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart." - Martin Amis (1949-) British writer
"Drama is essentially revelation." W.H. Auden (1907-1973) British writer
"There is a danger for technically gifted authors to sacrifice coherence and characterization to literary pyrotechnics." - Edward Hower, American writer
"Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal." - Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) American writer
“Great writers did not invent anything. They merely poured their souls into traditional materials and reshaped them." - Thomas Mann (1875-1955) German writer
"Something important was lost when would-be writers turned to the seminar room rather than the daily newspaper, with its demanding exposure to the nitty-gritty of the streets and the confusions of foreign lands. The result has been a literature oversupplied with exquisite studies of small-scale tragedies of suburbia and the frustrations of academic life, but impoverished by neglect of broader themes." - David Traxel, American historian
"Nothing fails like success." - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) American writer
"To find the recognition of a few enlightened contemporaries is the only real success an artist can have." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-born scientist
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." - Herman Melville (1819-1891) American writer
"Woe to a writer who values beauty over truth." - Adam Zagajewski (1945-) Polish writer
"Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul." - W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British writer
"Silence, exile, cunning." - James Joyce
"I think that anyone who does not need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something else. Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness." - Georges Simenon (1903-1989) Belgian-French writer.
[...] the divine tyranny of art. p789
"I once asked him how to write. His face grew very solemn. `Lord have mercy upon me,' he said, `to write, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: Take a quart or more of life-blood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoon of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots.’” - from "Memoir of a Midget" by Walter De La Mare (1873-1956) British writer
"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis." - William Styron (1925-2006) American Writer
"Forced to write every day to a great many arguments, and to produce startling paradoxes, he had lost all sense of reality, blinding himself with his own damp squibs." - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer describing a character in his classic novel SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION. When I first read this line, I thought Flaubert was talking about me personally. In those days, I signed contracts that obligated me to deliver a novel every two months, one after the other. I imposed upon myself the quota of 15 pages per day, which amounted to around 5,000 words, which meant around 8 to 10 hours a day living in my imagination. At times I did lose all sense of reality and felt as if I had no place in the so-called real world, which seemed boring and commonplace compared to my lurid imagination. It was a very intense way of life, ideal for an introvert, perfect for someone who liked to play around in his fantasies.
"An artist must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire." - David Hume (1711-1776) Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, essayist
"I have heart spasms when I can't manage a sentence. A simile must be as precise as a slide rule and as natural as the smell of dill." - Isaac Babel (1894-1940) Russian writer
"I find that Babel's style is even more concise than mine. It shows what can be done. Even when you've got all the water out of them, you can still clot the curds a little more." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) American writer
"May I die like a dog rather than try to rush through even one sentence before it is perfectly ripe." - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” - Elmore Leonard.(1924-2013) American writer
“Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” - George Orwell,
“Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense -the creative act.” Kenneth Rexroth, American poet
“[…] all imaginative writers are thieves, ruthlessly taking whatever they find and transforming it into art.” - Terry Teachout
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." - Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer
"There are three rules for writing novels. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British writer
"A novel is a meditation on existence, seen through imaginary characters. The form is unlimited freedom." - Milan Kundera, (1929-) Czech writer
"[...] in the art of the novel, existential discoveries are inseparable from the transformation of form." Milan Kundera
"[...] in the modern world, abandoned by philosophy and splintered by hundreds of scientific specialties, the novel remains to us as the last observatory from which we can embrace human life as a whole." - Milan Kundera (1929-) Czech writer
"Don't put anything in the books that no one would want to read." - Elmore Leonard (1925-2013) American writer. In other words: don't state the obvious.
"Be simple. Never try for a literary effect. Leave out every word and syllable you can." - Colette's advice to Georges Simenon
"The more words, the more errors." - The Talmud
"The other night we talked about the trick of literature in eliminating the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated dose of life." - Anais Nin referring to a conversation with Henry Miller
"The muscles of the artist are all in the mind, and they are strengthened by suffering, illness, and pain." - Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) French writer
"The writer is master of the inner hovering life." - Robert Musil (1880-1941) Austrian writer
"It is best, it seems to me, to separate one's inner striving from one’s trade as far as possible. It's not good when one's daily bread is tied to God's special blessing." - Albert Einstein
"I've found that the act of writing is itself a spiritual process. You're in communion with something greater than yourself. God created us in His image, and He gave us our creativity.” - Dean Koontz (1945-) American writer
"The quality that makes a bad novel somehow forgivable is a fervent belief in the story, no matter how misled or ill-expressed." - Nora Johnson (1933-) American writer
"I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing." - Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) American writer
“Good stories have a kind of logic about them. Look for that logic. If there isn’t any, you don’t have anything no matter how good the writing.” - Maggie (Gethman) Nichols, (1931-2001) former managing editor of FIELD AND STREAM magazine.
"How shall we judge the goodness of a writing? It should be smooth, clear, and short." - Ben Franklin (1706-1790) American writer and politician
"The secret of all good writing is sound judgement." - Horace (65 BCE-8 BCE) Roman poet
"The true poet is the one who inspires." - Paul Valery (1871-1945) French writer
" ... incompetence and whimsicality are sometimes part of the writer’s baggage." - A. Alvarez (1929-) British writer
"In vain does one knock at the gates of poetry with a sane mind." - Plato (428 BCE-348 BCE) Greek philosopher
"Poetry demands a man with a special gift ... or a touch of madness." - Aristotle (384 BCE - 322 BCE) Greek philosopher
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.” - John Dryden (1631-1700) English writer
"For Ivy Compton-Burnett, a plot is nothing but a line to hang the dirty linen on ..." - Hilary Mantel (1952-) English writer
“Have no fear of perfection - you’ll never reach it.” - Salvador Dali, quoted in THE WEEK 11/21/2014 p19
"... life is full of prostitutes of various types. Some are cabinet ministers and others authors." - Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) Egyptian writer, Nobel winner 1988
"Everything I have written I knew or I had heard of before I was eight years old." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"The creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an attempt to illustrate his personal world in terms of the great public world we all share." - Graham Greene
"The novelist's station is on the ambiguous borderline. Like a double agent, he must be able to cross over, to change sides at the drop of a hat." - Graham Greene (1904-1991) British writer
" ... a writer's imagination, like the body, fights against all reason against death." Graham Greene
"The true province of poetry is knowledge of the human heart." - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) American writer, 3rd President of the United States
"You have got to get into the habit of seeing people around you simply as material for books." - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer
"Immersed in life, you cannot see it clearly, too taken up with its joys and sorrows. To my mind an artist is a monstrosity, a thing outside nature." - Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer
No two persons ever read the same book. - Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) American writer
"[...] never try to be original! Think this over, and then decide whether I am right or wrong. Originality is little more than a form of wit, and not at all what you ought to be bothering about [...]." - Alphonse Lamartine (1790-1869) to Victor Hugo (1802-1885) both French writers
“I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.” - Baron Charles Louis de Montesquieu, 18th century French politician and philosopher
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from SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A LIFE by Jeffrey Meyers (Maugham (1874-1965)
”[Maugham] believed that it was impossible to write while looking out at a view, and always sat down to work in front of a blank wall. [...] He loved the actual process of writing [and] thought that writing, like drinking, was an easy habit to form and a difficult one to break. It was more an addiction than a vocation.” p37
“When an author is living in the scene of his story, perhaps among the people who have suggested the characters of his invention, he may well find himself bewildered by the mass of his impressions.... But absence will erase from his memory redundant details and inessential facts.” - Maugham (1874-1965) p38
”[...] assiduity, industry and discipline. Without these it is impossible to excel in any of the arts.” - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) from SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A LIFE by Jeffrey Meyers p69
“[William Somerset] Maugham believed and was fond of repeating that the essence of good prose was simplicity, lucidity and euphony.” - from SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A LIFE by Jeffrey Meyers - page 106
The secret of the craft of writing, he [William Somerset Maugham] explained, was to have common sense and stick to the point. - from SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A LIFE by Jeffrey Meyers p107
“[William Somerset] Maugham stated that when something has made him terribly unhappy, and he’s tortured and miserable, he can put it all into a story and it's astonishing what a comfort and relief it is.” - from SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A LIFE by Jeffrey Meyers page107
"It's only when you get away from a place that you can describe it," he [Maugham] said. "You recall the salient features and all the incidental details fall away." - p119
Both writers [Ernest Hemingway and William Somerset Maugham] achieved an incisive prose by deleting every word that was not absolutely necessary. "I try to say what I have to say with the greatest possible economy of language," Maugham noted. "I write as though I were writing telegrams. And when I have finished, I go over it all again to see what can be deleted.” - from SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A LIFE by Jeffrey Meyers- p215
[William Somerset] Maugham believed that great art needed to be grounded in "typical human emotions" and the "natural responses of the species.” - from SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A LIFE by Jeffrey Meyers- page 220
“I have never pretended to be anything but a story teller. It is a misfortune for me that the telling of a story just for the sake of a story is not an activity that is in favor with the intelligentsia.” - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British writer p229
“Edmund Wilson reproaches me because I haven't what he calls a personal style, so that when you read a page you know at once who the author is. But that is just what I have tried to avoid.” - William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British writer Maugham p281
[William Somerset Maugham] declared that Balzac was "the greatest novelist who ever lived.” - from SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A LIFE by Jeffrey Meyers-p193
“Good prose is like a window pane.” - George Orwell (1903-1950) British writer p345
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"[...] verse is for visions, prose for ideas." Ibsen
”Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” - Stephen King (1947-) American writer p19
"The life of writers is another life." - Anais Nin (1903-1977) Cuban-American writer
"When work is due but not being done, writers are subject to fits of compulsive motion." - Robert Stone
"[Ken] Kesey's wise maxim about offering more than what he could deliver, in order to deliver what he could, described his life's efforts - and not only his. It is true, I believe, of every person, or any group of people who ever set out to advance anything beyond their own personal advantage." - Robert Stone
"[...] answers to some questions - such as those concerning the moral justification for a war - are better pursued through the techniques of fiction than through any work a reporter can do. For one thing, facts unexamined can be made to subvert fundamental truth. Questions of this sort can be debated endlessly. But the intersection of facts and the truth was one of the problematic junctures I learned something about in Vietnam, which, I believe, made my going worthwhile." - Robert Stone (1937-2015) American writer
"There are satanic joys known to writers only." - Anais Nin (1903-1977) Cuban-American writer
Novels seem to me richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems. - Philip Larkin p27
“The best of any true writer is in his books, where it belongs. I don't recommend ever meeting an author whose books you admire. It spoils everything.” - the character Polly Buroughs in "The Spider's House" novel by Paul Bowles (1910-1999) American writer
”I’ve always been interested in the marginal person, the sort of person raised totally outside of society who has no direction, and who is capable of anything.” - Robert Stone (1937-2015) American writer, THE WEEK 1/23/2015 p38
"[...] a man could scarcely make his writing a reason for living unless he believed in the validity of that writing." - Paul Bowles
"I have always searched for the dense depths of the soul, that have not yet discovered themselves, where everything is still unconscious - there one can make the greatest discoveries." - Helene Schjerbeck, (1862-1946) Finnish painter, her statement equally applicable to writing.
"Many people live in such a horror of failure that they can never embark on any great enterprise. And this inability to get going in the first place is the worst kind of failure because there truly is no way out. You can cover up. You can hide behind a mask of exquisite sensibility. You can congratulate yourself on the fact that your standards are so high that no human effort could possible match up to them. You can make yourself unpleasant to your contemporaries by becoming expert on their shortcomings. In the end, nothing is achieved by this timidity." - James Fenton (1949-) English poet and critic.
"...the only books which ultimately count, for their permitted season, are expressions not of any ideas just then in the air (to use that delightfully two-edged phrase), but of the individual being who wrote that particular book. And personality seems a remarkably haphazard affair. You are born, for one inexplicable reason or another, as such and such a person, as a person endowed with private and especial faults and hallucinations. And if your book is ultimately to count, however transiently, you will in your book have managed to expose that person." - James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) American writer
"There is, fortunately, a minority composed of those who recognize early in their lives that the most beautiful and satisfying experiences open to humankind are not derived from the outside, but are bound up with the development of the individual's own feeling, thinking, and acting. The genuine artists, investigators, and thinkers have always been persons of this kind. However inconspicuously the life of these individuals runs its course, nonetheless the fruits of their endeavors are the most valuable contributions which one generation can make to its successors." - Albert Einstein
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Items from MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS by Truman Capote (1924-1984)
”Then one day I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master.” - Truman Capote page xi
“It [writing] stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad, and then made an even more alarming discovery: the difference between very good writing and true art: it is subtle, but savage. And after that the whip came down.” - Truman Capote p xii
[…] the great demanding arc of beginning -middle-end. - p xii
“[…] it is true that one learns more from failure than one does from a success.” - Truman Capote
“Writers, at least those who take genuine risks, who are willing to bite the bullet and walk the plank, have a lot in common with another breed of lonely men - the guys who make a living shooting pool and dealing cards.” - Truman Capote p xv
“To begin with, I think most writers, even the best, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek.” - Truman Capote p xvii
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“If you can’t be funny, be interesting.” Harold Ross THE WEEK 2/17/2015 p17
“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but to say what we are unable to say.” - Anais Nin
“Adjectives and adverbs are like spices. Overdo them and your reader will suffer indigestion.”
“We write to taste life twice.” - Anais Nin.
”... art's purpose (is) to touch the spirit through the imagination, not merely to imitate nature's imperfections.” - Gustave Moreau as quoted by Richard Dorment in the NYRB
It is better to fail in originality that to succeed in imitation. - Herman Melville
There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky THE WEEK magazine 12/18/2015 page 21
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Items from Doris Lessing
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach that writing is hard work, and that you have to give up a great deal of your personal life to be a writer.
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all.
But writing can’t be a way of life – the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
Ask any modern storyteller and they’ll say there’s always a moment when they’re touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.
As you start to write, the questions begin: Why do you remember this and not that? Why remember in every detail a whole week, month, a long ago year, but then a complete blank? How do you know that what you remember is more important than what you don’t?
I’m very unhappy when I’m not writing. I need to write. I think it’s possibly some kind of psychological balancing mechanism – but that’s not only true for writers … anybody. I think that we’re always … just a step away from lunacy anyway, and we need something to keep us balanced.
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Audiences really do like to be told a definite story in a compelling way. It has to have captivating characters, an exciting challenge for them to solve, and a solution that’s worthy of the time we’ve taken to watch it. - Jack Viertel writing about plays but equally applicable to novels
“What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I’m afraid the pompous word for that is art. Picasso himself said it. Art, he said, is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth.” - Orson Welles (1915-1985) American actor and filmmaker quoted in THE NEW YORKER 12/7/2015 page 78
“Demystify writing as completely as possible. Keep the pretension level as low as possible.” - Joseph Epstein, American writer quoted in NATIONAL REVIEW 5/28/2016 page 24
Physical exercise helps bookworms more than they realize. The data on exercise and creativity are strong. - Alice W. Flaherty, Harvard psychiatrist
“In the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.” - Philip K. Dick, quoted in THE WEEK magazine, page 17
[…] to be an artist, in his (the novel’s character’s) view, was above all to be someone submissive. Someone who submitted himself to mysterious, unpredictable messages, that you would be led, for want of a better word and in the absence of any religious belief, to describe as intuitions, messages which nonetheless commanded you in an imperious and categorical manner, without leaving the slightest possibility of escape - except by losing any notion of integrity and self respect. These messages could involve destroying work, or even an entire body of work, to set off in a radically new direction, or even occasionally no direction at all, without having any project at all, or the slightest hope of continuing. - from THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY a novel by Michel Houellebecq
If you really want to write, give yourself at least three hours, sit and write. Don’t answer the phone. Don't read the mail. Music can be distracting. Don't let anyone bullshit you - there are no special gimmicks, techniques, gnosis or writing school can make you sit still and write. If you're not bursting with plots, feelings, narratives, attitudes and opinions, you're in the wrong profession. Only a peculiar variety of human being can sit alone for long hours, playing literary mind games. Good luck with your writing. Never forget that you're trying to communicate with other minds.
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I asked how you can ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all
and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was
any good
if you have to be sure don't write
W.S. Merwin (1927-) American poet
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