About Writing Quotes

“Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully...”
― Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

“Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.”
― Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

“In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can’t be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.”
― Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

“The sad truth is, S—, most people are not writers. This has nothing to do with literacy—or intelligence, or general culture. There are people who can correct the grammar, spelling, diction, and style of a college English paper with the best of them—who are still not writers. Indeed, most of what gets published in books, magazines, and newspapers is not written by real writers—which is one reason why so much of it is so bad.”
― Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

“Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They're not good at relationships. Often they're drunks. And writing—good writing—does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder—so that eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably, if only with death, the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying—and often drives us mad. So if you're not a writer, consider yourself fortunate.”
― Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

“The act of refusing to put down words, or crossing out words already down, while you concentrate on the vision you are writing about, makes new words come.”
― Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: 7 Essays, 4 Letters, 5 Interviews

“When writers get (from readers or from themselves) criticism in the form “The story would be more believable if such and such happened” or “The story would be more interesting if such and such …” and they agree to make use of the criticism, they must translate it: “Is there any point in the story process I can go back to, and, by examining my visualization more closely, catch something I missed before, which, when I notate it, will move the visualization/notation process forward again in this new way?” In other words, can the writers convince themselves that on some ideal level the story actually did happen (as opposed to “should have happened”) in the new way, and that it was their inaccuracy as a story-process practitioner that got it going on the wrong track at some given point? If you don’t do this, the corrections are going to clunk a bit and leave a patch-as-patch-can feel with the reader.”
― Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

“At the beginning of a story, I am likely to have one or more images in my mind, some clearer than others (like the strip of light up Janice’s arm), which, when I examine them, suggest relations to one another. Using the story process—envisioning and notating, envisioning and notating—I try to move from one of these images to the next, lighting and focusing, step by step, on the dark areas between. As I move along, other areas well ahead in the tale will suddenly come vaguely into light. When I actually reach the writing of them, I use the story process to bring them into sharper focus still.”
― Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

“The general point: the story process keeps the vision clear and the action moving. But if we do not notate the vision accurately, if we accept some phrase we should have discarded, if we allow to stand some sentence that is not as sharp as we can make it, then the vision is not changed in the same way it would have been otherwise: the new sections of the vision will not light up quite so clearly, perhaps not at all. As well, the movement of the vision—its action—will not develop in the same way if we put down a different phrase. And though the inaccurate employment of the story process may still get you to the end of the tale, the progress of the story process, which eventually registers in the reader’s mind as “the plot,” is going to be off: an inaccuracy in either of the two story process elements, the envisioning or the notation, automatically detracts from the other. When they go off enough, the progress of the story process will appear unclear, or clumsy, or just illogical.”
― Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews