Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into...

I recommend writing standing up from time to time. It’s easier to dance when you finish writing.

Bye-bye. Nice knowing you. But if you are waiting for that perfect idea to strike like lightning during a dust storm (I live in New Mexico), you could be waiting a long time. Ideas are...

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn’t, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that...

Aspiring authors, get this through your head. Cover art serves one purpose, and one purpose only, to get potential customers interested long enough to pick up the book to read the back cover blurb. In...

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.’ Stein on Writing

Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it’s flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I began a new story. My characters are...

It’s good to write badly. Things can only get better.

Don’t fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author’s affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much...

I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.’ And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. …...

While I’m writing, I’m far away;and when I come back, I’ve gone.

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

If you don’t make time for writing, writing won’t make time for you.

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It’s like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field — first base, second...

Write what is important to you, regardless of fashion or marketability or anything like that – all those things are so far out of your control that you may as well not think about them....

Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and...

Every artist needs canvass, mine just happens to be Microsoft Word and a Thesaurus.

No matter how entertaining, diverse, concise, or detailed, a writing craft book is, it’s not going to work magic on you, it’s not going to suddenly make you a brilliant writer simply by reading it....

…the answer is not in the damn blank page – it’s in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up – exhume the past again …

Murphy is a writer’s best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he’ll steal the silver.

I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.

Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. J.Paul Getty

According to Wallace, the expectation that art amuses is a ‘poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with,’ since it places all of the power with the audience, sometimes breeding resentment on the...

No writing is effortless. I’m not saying you can’t have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I’m not...

When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn’t have, and I could order this environment in the way that I...

I’d written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one’s own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I’d made a habit–and eventually a profession–of...

If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can’t make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and...

Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.

If you start to revise before you’ve reached the end, you’re likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing–and reading–is a solitary business. And it’s good to know...

There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.

It’s the writing that teaches you.

In the minds of some people, writing is one thing, but thinking is quite another. If they define writing as spelling, the production of sentences with random meanings, and punctuation, then they might have a...

A dear and long-time friend,… asked me, “Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?” I replied, “Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its...

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing. Voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style but a voice all their...

Contrary to popular belief, people always say “It was a pleasure doing business with you”. It is the only thing that has stayed with me after an assignment. Always mix business with pleasure. That is...

Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or...

A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution...

Voice is really about letting your characters loose.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.

One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.

bad guy” anymore, he’s the BAD GUY!

I’ve learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it’s not what I thought it was. It doesn’t make you special and sparkly. You don’t...