Professional writers have much to tell us about the writing process, from overcoming writer's block to revising and editing. Let's see what advice we can pick up from the pros.
As many professional authors will tell you, aspiring writers are often hungry for advice--eager to pick up a tip that will open the door to a successful writing life. Here are ten of those inside tips: not words of encouragement, necessarily, but sound, practical advice that can help you become a better writer.
Professional writers have a lot to tell us about the writing process. Some of the advice may be helpful, some of it encouraging, and some may do no more than raise a smile.
More advice on writing from professional writers, past and present.
Excerpts from twelve of the authors who have contributed pieces to the New York Times column "Writers on Writing."
There must be a secret to good writing--the kind of writing we enjoy, remember, learn from, and try to imitate. While countless writers have been willing to reveal that secret, only rarely do they seem to agree on what it is. Here are ten of those not-so-secret revelations about good writing.
Here are ten writers and editors, ranging from Cicero to Stephen King, offering their thoughts on the differences between a good writer and a bad writer.
For many of us, the hardest part of writing is getting started. And we're not alone. Many professional writers have experienced--and, more importantly, overcome--writer's block. So let's see what advice we can pick up from the pros.
Are you the sort of writer who has to be in just the right mood before the words start to flow? Professional writers say that waiting for inspiration to strike is usually just a striking waste of time.
If a cork-lined room isn't available, where is the place to write? J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Annie Dillard, and several other professional writers offer some advice.
Too often in schools the injunction to "write it over again" is delivered (or at least perceived) as a punishment or dull chore. But as the twelve professionals here remind us, rewriting is an essential part of composing. And in the end it truly can be the most rewarding part.
What does it mean to write "with style"? Here we consider some of the different ways in which 24 professional writers have defined and characterized style.
Over the centuries, writers have not only been making good metaphors but also studying these powerful figurative expressions--considering where metaphors come from, what purposes they serve, why we enjoy them, and how we understand them. Here are the thoughts of fourteen writers, philosophers, and critics on the power and pleasure of metaphor.
English spelling is complicated, inconsistent, and often downright ornery. But don't take our word for it. Consider what some well-known writers have had to say about English orthography.
In this poem (included in "Tobogganing on Parnassus," 1912), Franklin P. Adams (better known as FPA) delivers an amusing encomium to the poet's best friend--his thesaurus.
Humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945) describes the sort of commitment that NOT writing demands.
William F. Buckley, Jr., once wrote, "I am often accused of an inordinate reliance on unusual words, and desire to defend myself against the insinuation that I write as I do simply to prove that I have returned recently from the bowels of a dictionary with a fish in my mouth." Here he presents his defense.
Anthony Burgess's "Language Made Plain" is an engaging and informed introduction to the field of linguistics. And his occasional outbursts are reserved for targets significantly larger and more ominous than abusers of "whom" or fans of "irregardless."
Known to the world by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass"), Charles Lutwidge Dodgson composed this essay on letter writing to accompany the Wonderland Stamp-Case, which he himself had designed.
Whether or not writing turns out to be your profession, it's quite likely to be something you will do all your life. Thought of in this way, the goal of becoming the sort of "small writer" that Natalia Ginzburg describes is itself, perhaps, a great ambition.
When asked by Bill Moyers why she continued to write, Doris Lessing said, "I have to. It is what I do." Writing can be a delicious compulsion--one that perhaps only fellow writers can truly understand.
Bernard Levin was one of the most erudite, influential, and controversial journalists of his era. Here, in addition to offering some of Levin's observations on writers and writing, we have included a sentence in which he used 109 consecutive adjectives to describe the Conservative government of the day.
In the more than 300 interviews given by Norman Mailer over a long career, he freely expressed his views on a broad range of topics. Here we've extracted a few of his comments on writing: on the fear of writer's block (and how to overcome it), the nature of style, the relation between fiction and nonfiction, the value of writing classes, and two of his major literary influences.
British novelist William Somerset Maugham understood that becoming a better writer involves confronting our limitations--identifying those qualities that stubbornly resist all our efforts to improve them. But even more important is the next step: building on our strengths.
In his review of "The Social Objectives of School English," H.L. Mencken employed his lively, combative style to skewer "the worst idiots" in "the slums of pedagogy": teachers of English.
Here, in passages drawn from articles and reviews written between 1910 and 1950, are some of Mencken's observations on the writing trade--and some invigorating lessons on how not to be a dull writer.
From her early days as an editor at Random House through her many years as a teacher of English at Princeton, Toni Morrison has shown an abiding interest in the writer's craft. Here, in excerpts from a number of interviews, Morrison offers her thoughts on the practice and the process of writing.
Even for an author who's as prolific and accomplished as Joyce Carol Oates, writing does not always come easily.
In George Orwell's best known essay, "Politics and the English Language," he offered six elementary rules as an antidote to what he perceived as "the decay of language" in his time.
In a 1998 interview, poet and short-story writer Grace Paley said that she was so "neurotically anti-authoritarian" that she couldn't read a cookbook instruction "without the furious response: 'Is that a direct order?'" Let's listen to Paley's indomitable voice as she shares her thoughts on writing and the writing process.
"That punctuation is important all agree," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1848, "but how few comprehend the extent of its importance!"
While serving as a professor of English at Cambridge University, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch published a series of lectures titled On the Art of Writing (1916). In these excerpts from his lecture "On Style," Q discusses the dangers of "fine writing," advising students to "Murder your darlings."
The two main vices of jargon, said Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, are "that it uses circumlocution rather than short straight speech" and "that it habitually chooses vague woolly abstract nouns rather than concrete ones." Fortunately, in lecture five of what he called his "course in First Aid to writing," he offered a few "rough rules" for combating jargon.
In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Robert Pirsig recalls a problem shared by many of the students in his creative writing class at Montana State College in Bozeman: "They just couldn't think of anything to say." In this passage he describes the strategy that enabled one student to overcome her writer's block.
Here we collect some grownup advice on writing from Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to children and adults as Dr. Seuss.
Widely regarded as one of the finest prose stylists in English, Jonathan Swift once defined style as "Proper words in proper places." But who's to say what's "proper"--and just what does Swift's maxim really mean? To find out, let's return to the source.
Here we turn to advice from Scotsman Sir Thomas Urquhart (1605-1660), a master of euphuism and one of the world's worst writers.
Some observations from humorist James Thurber on reading, writing, and editing.
As his legions of readers are well aware, Mark Twain gloried in expressing himself through language. And throughout his life, this master stylist had a great deal to say about the art of writing and the nature of language.
John Updike may have been the quintessential "lyrical writer of the ordinary," but extraordinary lessons can still be found both in and beneath the glittering surface of his prose. Here, gathered from a variety of interviews and articles, are a few more lessons from one of the finest writers of the past 50 years.
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., offers some deceptively simple principles on writing with style.
"When I read," Eudora Welty once told an interviewer, "I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me."
It's remarkable what a good writer can do with a seemingly dull subject--though it may take a bit longer than usual to complete the assignment. In this case, the good writer was E.B. White, and the essay that took more than a quarter century to write was "Once More to the Lake."
Meet essayist E.B. White--and consider the advice he has to offer on writing and the writing process.
"When I read," Eudora Welty once told an interviewer, "I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me."
"The habit of writing for my eye only is good practice," wrote British author Virginia Woolf in her diary. "It loosens the ligaments."
