The Writer's Notebook Quotes

“Friend, let me tell you this: telling in stories often attempts to simplify, to clarify, but when it's really working, telling complicates and adds dimension to the experience of the story. It interprets situations and characters, and it invites us to do the same. It involves us. (Peter Rock)”
― Tin House Books, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“In other words, don't be reductive. Often, writers will rush to an ending that completes, or sums up, or reduces their story as opposed to moving to a place where it goes to something they may not understand and that may be incomplete but is more honest. That rush doesn't do a service to anyone. It doesn't do a service to the work, and it doesn't do a service to the reader. We know that things are complex; we want things to be complex so that, together, we can look deeply into the layers of an open system.”
― Aimee Bender, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“In Murakami's short story 'The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day,' the main character is a writer. In describing the act of writing to a tightrope walker, he says, 'What a writer is *supposed* to do is observe and observe and observe again, and put off making judgments to the last possible moment.' I think that is a beautiful description of writing; it lets the world be, but also there is a moment, finally, of some kind of opinion. There is that moment, but to hold it off is a lovely and worthwhile goal.”
― Aimee Bender, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“Here is something I understand about psychology, and I think it relates to fiction: if you loosen up your understanding of yourself in some way, then who knows how it will affect who you are in the world. In the same way, you can explore an avenue of your character - something about your character's past, or something in your character's present - and you don't know how the reader is going to connect it to what's going on in the story. That gives the reader a wonderful job to do, which is to try to make the links. I don't think you need to plan that in advance, or ever. I think it can happen if you follow what you think is interesting about the character.
In order to do this, you must trust what you don't understand. Our minds are so adept at trying to explain things that you have to shut that instinct down. As a starting point, choose an action that you can't explain. Often, writing about something that you don't fully get - what it's about or what's in it - is actually very useful because it takes you away from talking about theme or talking about abstractions. If you don't know what something is about, you are probably going to be very concrete in your exploration of it. You're going to say, 'I don't know what's in this world, so I'm going to be very direct in the way I present it.' This gives the reader tons of space to form his or her own interpretations.”
― Aimee Bender, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“One member of Paley's preschool class is 'The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter.' He is probably vaguely autistic, high-functioning, yet solitary to a degree considered irregular. His playmates invite him into their games (which are ongoing, morphing narratives), but he stubbornly resists. He loves his helicopter. He would like to be a helicopter himself so that he could fly with his friend, the machine, and have adventures. Machine adventures. Rescue missions, yet with rotors, so that, perhaps, there wouldn't be hugging involved. (Antonya Nelson)”
― Tin House Books, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“*The story,* I like to say and remember, *is always smarter than you* - there will be patterns of theme, image,e and idea that are much savvier and more complex than you could have come up with on your own. Find them with your marking pens as they emerge in your drafts. Become a student of your work in progress. Look for what your material is telling you about your material. Every aspect of a story has its own story. (Lucy Corin)”
― Tin House Books, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“[The Great Gatsby] is a tour de force of revision. So much so that critics, who rarely mention the edit of a book, commented on the quality of Gatsby's rewriting, not just its writing, in reviews. For H. L. Mencken, the novel had 'a careful and brilliant finish. ... There is evidence in every line of hard work and intelligent effort. ... The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.' ... Careful, sound, carefully written, hard effort, wrote and rewrote, artfully contrived not improvised, structure, discipline: all these terms refer, however obliquely, not to the initial act of inspiration, but to editing.
Organization and clarity do not dominate the writing process. At some point, though, a writer must pull coherence from confusion, illuminate what lives in shadow, shade what shines too brightly. Gatsby is the cat's meow case study of crossing what Michael Ondaatje calls 'that seemingly uncrossable gulf between an early draft of a book ... and a finished product' - in other words, editing.”
― Susan Bell, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“One danger zone is dialogue ... At the moment of ultimate showing, we writers get nervous. ... We allow characters to tell us about the story, to soliloquize, to have insights into their lives that no real person could manage. We also work very hard to control the part of dialogue that is not in the character's voice - the tags. We have the characters chortle and wheeze and whisper and whine; we use adverbs to remind the reader and reassure ourselves how things are being said. A nice contrast to this tendency is the following conversation, form Ernest Hemingway's story 'The Sea Change':

'No thanks,' he said.
'It doesn't do any good to say I'm sorry.'
'No.'
'Nor to tell you how it is?'
'I'd rather not hear.'
'I love you very much.'
'Yes, this proves it.'
'I'm sorry,' she said, 'if you don't understand.'
'I understand. That's the trouble. I understand.'

How different our experience would be if the storytelling were more anxious:

'No thanks,' he said bitterly, the words sharp in his mouth.
'It doesn't do any good to say I'm sorry?' she poignantly wondered.
'No.' Phil touched her hand with his, then drew it away. He ground his teeth.
'Nor to tell you how it is?' she Sapphically queried.
'I'd rather not hear,' he groused.
'I love you very much,' she said, perhaps ingenuously.
(Peter Rock)”
― Tin House Books, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“Now I ask you to consider writing from the inside, to convince yourself of your characters' dimensions before you attempt to narrate around them or explain them. We always misstep when we consider our writing of a story as a separate action from the story itself ... Characters would find the suggestion that they are in a story ridiculous and insulting; when writing is truly working, both writer and reader would share this sense of insult, and resent the interruption.”
― Tin House Books, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“In her childhood, [Sylvia] Wright had heard a tune in which some lines seemed to be 'They have slain the Earl Amurray / and Lady Mondegreen.' It wasn't until years later that Wright realized the lyric was 'They have slain the Earl of Moray / and laid him on the green.'
We all have mondegreens. ... In his book Tiny Courts, poet David Bromige has a woman say that she's reading a book entitled 'Civilization and Its Discotheques.”
― Tin House Books, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“But often it's the inexact, the awful, the mistaken linguistic turn that manages to say the right thing because it unmoors us from our perceived relationship to the subject about which we're trying to write. Often, poetry is enriched by saying precisely what we didn't set out to say. (D. A. Powell)”
― Tin House Books, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“If you've used adverbs, look at them carefully. Adverbs are the weakest words; verbs are the strongest. Many, many times I've found that I have the wrong verb so I'm attempting to cheat and modify the wrong verb by using an adverb.”
― Chris Offutt, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“Shakespeare doesn't use flashbacks, and his characters are more likely to philosophize than to remember. (Margot Livesey)”
― Tin House Books, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

“The old nut goes, 'Write what you know,' but often a writer is clearer about what he doesn't know and must learn about.”
― Susan Bell, The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House