WoW Saturday
Both "writers on writing" and "words of wisdom" can be shortened with the same word. Thus, welcome to WoW Saturdays, June to September 2011. Enjoy this collection of writers quotes throughout the summer.
The habits and methods of writers are sometimes peculiar enough to be interesting.
John Cheever wrote some of his early stories in his underwear. Hemingway is said to have written some of his fiction while standing up. Thomas Wolfe reportedly wrote parts of his voluminous novels while leaning over the top of a refrigerator. Flannery O'Connor sat for two hours every day at a typewriter facing the back of a clothes dresser, so that in those last painful years, when she was dying of lupus, she'd have as close to nothing as possible to look at while she wrote her stories about sin.
Eudora Welty has said that she straight- pinned pieces of her stories together on the dining room table, as though she were pinning together parts of a dress. Maya Angelou secreted herself in a hotel room for days and weeks of concentrated isolation while she worked on her autobiographical tales. Richard Russo wrote his first novels in the secluded corners of cafes.
As for me, I prefer a coal room in the basement of our house in southern Illinois, and I write my first drafts blind on an old manual typewriter.
- Kent Haruf
Publication's purest joys belong to the first-time author. Whether you're a novelist, a poet or a nonfiction writer, initially there's something giddy and unreckonable to that process by which an untidy manuscript is converted into the neat, durable-looking, hinged rectangle of a book. Magic alone, seemingly, could account for such a transformation.
- Brad Leithauser
Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules of Writing:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that they will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character they can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the plot.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing:
1. Never open a book with the weather.
2. Avoid prologs.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialog.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose"
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the parts the readers tend to skip.
"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."
- Vita Sackville-West
