Aphorisms about Writing and Rewriting

from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

• The first draft is the cocoon in which the real story matures.
• The need to write fiction is an incurable disease you are born with.
• I write to find out what I think and believe.
• Create characters, not ideas.
• Thinking about your book is the real work. Putting it on paper is easy.
• In rewrite mode -- anomalies are opportunities, adding layers to the narrative.
• Sometimes a book happens to you -- like you are pregnant with it.
• One measure of the power of an author is how little needs to happen to show the characters undergoing enormous life-shifting changes. the best can tell a story with both subtlety and passion, where a look or a word has the narrative power of an earthquake. By that measure, Penelope Fitzgerald is one of the finest novelists of all time.
• The creative phase of writing is very different from the polishing and editing phase.
• To write something new or to significantly rewrite, I need to find a "generative" phrase -- a line that implies a whole character, a whole life; a line that leads to another line and another and that generates a rhythm that carries the story forward. That's a very different process from analysis and criticism.
• Sometimes a good line is a hazard. You can like a line so much that you keep it, even though it wrecks the flow of the lines around it and of the story as a whole.
• The story is the vessel into which I pour my blood and guts -- making exterior what's interior, so I can look at it and try to make sense of it.
• In writing, what is most private and personal is what connects us most with others, for that is what we most have in common.
• The aim is to get to a state of "flow" in which what matters to you finds external expression, and that external expression triggers in others something resembling your own internal experience.
• Poetry happens when a word you would have never expected, turns out to be perfect, and changes how you think forever after.
• Definition of poetry -- When words explode in your mind, and that feels good.
• Our self-knowledge and our knowledge of others is limited. Every memoir we write is fictitious in ways we do not fathom. It is more honest to call what we write "fiction", and to shape the story the way its internal logic demands.
• The characters appear in your dreams and you write down what they say and do; then edit and rewrite. It's their book, not yours. Treat them with respect, and follow their advice.
• Once your characters come alive, you are always writing -- no matter where you are and no matter what else you might be doing at the same time.
• Publication does not equal success. You have to enjoy writing for its own sake. Half a million people run in marathons in the US each year. Only a couple dozen win. They simply enjoy doing it.
• For me, when the characters come alive and take charge, and I'm just along for the ride -- that's an author's high: a wonderful ride.
• When you begin your novel, the characters are your means for telling the story. If and when your characters come alive, the characters become the story.
• Typically, I begin with a critical situation and scene. The I hear the main characters talking in that scene and from that begin to flesh out who they are and some of the scenes and incidents that might have led to that point. Then I decide on an opening scene. Then fill in.