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He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
That’s no good. If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good. It’s best to go on to some other area, where the deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher.
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
My own schedule is pretty clear-cut. Mornings belong to whatever is new – the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait. Basically, mornings are my prime writing time.
Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to.
And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it have contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.
I think we’re actually talking about creative sleep. Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream.
In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Certainly I couldn’t keep it in on the grounds that it’s good; it should be good, if I’m being paid to do it. What I’m not being paid to do is be self-indulgent.
When it’s on target, a simile delights us in much the same way meeting an old friend in a crowd of strangers does. By comparing two seemingly unrelated objects – a restaurant bar and a cave, a mirror and a mirage – we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way.
I began learning my lessons in this regard by reading Chandler, Hammett, and Ross MacDonald; I gained perhaps even more respect for the power of compact, descriptive language from reading T. S. Eliot
always reminding yourself that your job is to say what you see, and then to get on with your story.
it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub.
It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.
The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
