When Pablo Neruda wrote me a poem!

June, 1968, I was living in Buenos Aires with Patrick, an Anglo-Argentine businessman whose passion was poetry. In the daylight hours, he was a senior executive at a foodstuffs conglomerate known especially for its English-style mustard. At night, and on weekends, he wrote sonnets and villanelles, many of which were published in literary journals in England. I thought that Patrick should experiment with free verse, and told him so, but he did not depart from meter and rhyme.

Even though I had won a minor U.S. poetry contest, my own efforts were mostly being rejected, but Patrick admired the energy of my poems. I was inspired by walking urban streets and by the lives of poets who had committed suicide. Patrick and I didn’t copy each other’s styles. We delighted in each other, but I can’t say it was love—at least, not from my side.

I can’t remember whether it was Patrick or I who first got the idea that we should have Pablo Neruda write an introduction to a joint collection of our poems. We were fearless and convinced that our poems merited the great poet’s benediction. My plan was to show up at Neruda’s doorstep, in Chile, and wing it. Patrick drove me to the airport and I flew to Santiago, a short hop of slightly more than two hours. From Santiago, I took a sixty-mile bus trip west to Isla Negra, where Neruda lived in a house by the Pacific Ocean. I was greeted at the door by Matilde, his wife. In my limited Spanish, I introduced myself as an American poet who had long admired Neruda. Would it be possible to meet him? Matilde informed me that he was not home; he had gone to a nearby quarry—his morning routine—to watch the workers excavate stone. She invited me to come back at one o’clock for lunch.

Nervous and excited, I spent the intervening hour walking aimlessly on Isla Negra’s rural roads. Though it was not actually an island, Neruda himself had christened the area “Isla” for its isolation and “Negra” for the dark outcrop of rocks just offshore. When I returned, promptly at one, Neruda (a burly man with an expression of inquiry on his face), Matilde, and a young woman were sitting at a round dining table. A place had been set for me. Neruda introduced me to the young woman, Teresa Castro, his literary secretary. A maid served us a four-course meal; I recall the main dish, a delicious fresh-caught salmon. After every course, Neruda ate several sardines as a condiment. This was his custom, his palate cleanser. The sardines rested, shiny and fresh, on a small plate, waiting to be demolished.

Third wives, in my experience, can be insecure. Although Neruda and Teresa spoke English, Matilde, his third wife, did not. To include her in the lunch conversation, and to put her mind at ease that I wasn’t there to steal her husband, I spoke Portuguese (I had lived in Brazil for the previous year) while Neruda, Matilde, and Teresa spoke Spanish. We understood each other, more or less.

We talked about my government’s refusal to let Neruda enter the U.S. As a member of the Chilean Communist Party, he could not get a visa. He was incensed. He had many admirers in the United States and invitations from prestigious institutions to give readings. He remembered fondly the one time he had been allowed to visit, when the playwright Arthur Miller prevailed upon the Johnson Administration to let him attend a congress sponsored by penInternational, in New York City, in 1966. Neruda and I talked about his career in Chile’s diplomatic service—postings in Burma, Mexico, Spain—and the abundance of objects and trinkets that filled his house. He said he couldn’t live without being surrounded by his “toys,” big and small. Finally, I broached the reason for my visit. Would he read a few of the poems that I had brought with me? To my delight, he said that after lunch he would take his customary nap and after that he would read our poems. If he liked them, he would write something for our book.

While Neruda napped, Teresa gave me a tour of the house, which, viewed from the outside, looked like a houseboat with random additions. Inside, it was crammed with collections of all sorts. Neruda’s obsession with the sea was on display everywhere. Hundreds of seashells lined the bookshelves and covered every tabletop. There were nautical instruments, ships in bottles, paintings of ships, teeth from sperm whales. Teresa told me the names of some of the figureheads—Jenny Lind, La Novia, Medusa—women carved in wood, in contact with the sea but oblivious to its dangers.

Teresa and I were close in age; we bonded easily. At around four o’clock, Neruda summoned Teresa to give her a poem he had written for Patrick and me. He had liked our poems! I read his typewritten poem with trembling hands. It would work perfectly for our book.

I conveyed my thanks, through Teresa, and she walked me to the bus stop for my return to Santiago. On the highway, a young man, also waiting for the bus, was listening to a news report on a transistor radio. I caught the words “Robert Kennedy” and “disparo!” Bobby Kennedy had been shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles. He had undergone extensive neurosurgery, but he was not improving. I felt desperately far from home and wished that I could be with Americans.

When I arrived at my hotel in Santiago, that evening, Kennedy was still fighting for his life. Feeling vulnerable, I made a last-minute decision. Rather than fly back over the Andes, I would take a colectivo (jitney) through a pass in the mountain range to the Argentine city of Mendoza and fly the last leg of the trip, from Mendoza to Buenos Aires.

The following morning, I shared the back seat of the colectivo with a middle-aged man. A middle-aged woman sat in front with the driver. During the entire trip of nearly five hours, she talked loudly to the driver about how she was going to show up in Mendoza unannounced, surprise her good-for-nothing husband, and catch him with his new girlfriend. Her fury was boundless. She didn’t stop her tirade even when the driver had to negotiate patches of snow at the summit of the pass.

As soon as the colectivo arrived in downtown Mendoza, the woman screamed at the driver to stop. Then she leapt out, ran up to a couple holding hands as they walked along the street, pulled a knife out of her purse, and plunged it into the man’s back. For a few seconds, the three of us in the colectivo were frozen in our seats. The two women screamed at each other while the man lay bleeding on the sidewalk. Then the driver, my fellow-passenger, and I jumped out of the vehicle. Pedestrians stared in disbelief. The wife shouted, “This is my husband, the adulterer! I hope he dies! Taking up with this tart, he deserves it!” The other woman yelled back what I took to be obscenities.

It didn’t take long for the police and an ambulance to arrive. The jealous wife was escorted away, and her husband, still alive, was put on a stretcher and driven off in the ambulance with its siren blaring. Two policemen stayed behind to question the onlookers.

Walking away from the crime scene, I passed a kiosk and saw the newspaper headline. Bobby Kennedy had died overnight, twenty-six hours after he was shot. I bought a paper and read the full story. My flight to Buenos Aires wasn’t until early evening. Saddened, my nerves frayed, I decided to pass the time by going to the movies. “Bonnie and Clyde” was the only movie playing that had an English soundtrack. I wasn’t in the mood for more violence, but I went to the film anyway.  Afterward, I found a taxi to take me to the Mendoza airport.

As I stood in line to purchase my ticket to Buenos Aires on Aerolíneas Argentinas, I heard American English spoken behind me. I turned to see two young men in dark business suits. Hoping to tell them what I had witnessed that afternoon and to talk about the tragic news of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, I suggested we go to the airport lounge for a drink. At the bar, I ordered a double Scotch. Both men ordered orange juice. “I would feel safer if we were flying on an American airline,” I said. “Don’t you want something stronger?”

“No,” they said, in unison. One of the young men explained that they were Mormons and didn’t drink alcohol. I had never met a Mormon before and knew nothing about their prohibitions or their worldwide missionary activities. I was still outside my culture.

Patrick and I never finished our book. I left Buenos Aires some months later and didn’t return for twenty-two years until, in 1990, my husband and I had tea at our hotel with Patrick and his wife. Both Patrick and I thought that the poem Pablo Neruda wrote for us was lost. He couldn’t find his copy, and I couldn’t find mine.

Patrick died in 2003. In 2014, packing for a move, I found Neruda’s poem filed among my grade-school report cards. At almost the same time, the poem was discovered in Santiago, by the Neruda Foundation’s archivists.

Roa Lynn and Patrick Morgan
were moored in these waters,
bewildered on this river,
hostile, florid, morose,
they go off to sea or to hell,
with an intensifying love
that bathes them in light
or plucks them from the algae:
but the waters rush on
through darkness, full of voices,
a rhapsody of kisses and ashes,
streets bloodied by soldiers,
unacceptable reunions
of grief and blubbering:
so much carried by these waters!
our pace and place,
the ferment of the favelas
and ghoulish masks.
Just look what the water’s carrying
up this four-armed river!

“19” [“Roa Lynn and Patrick Morgan”], by Pablo Neruda, from “Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems.” Copyright © 2016 by Fundacíon Pablo Neruda. Translation copyright © 2016 by Forrest Gander. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.

(Originally Published at the NewYorker)

Why do I write? Self appreciation note of a dolt!

People often ask me, why do I write? They ask me how I get time to write despite my job and need to eat and defecate.Of course, I don’t have a reason for that. A writer should never have a reason to write just like a lover should never have a reason to love.

I am a boring person. Not that I was ever a crowd charmer, but now I have even stopped trying. If you try too hard doing something you are not meant for, you look like a loser.I like my corner couch in the office corridor with a cup of cappuccino more relaxing than wooing in a pub. When I am not writing I am enjoying the life as it is, looking at the birds, watching porn, getting lost in the city once in a while and taking a random stroll to a random stranger for a random talk.

I don’t know whether I write well or not. But I was definitely passionate despite being mediocre and mostly a reader of short stories and simple words instead of heavyweights like Shakespeare and Dickens. I never went for a literature degree. Never attended writing workshops. My vocabulary is worse than most secondary school kids out there.

I generally get rejected by magazines and other places where writers get popular. They say that they read my work, liked it, but they don’t have a space for me this time. ‘Keep sending, keep writing’ is what they generally end with. I have taken this as my slogan of life. Maybe, at fifty or ninety I would be good enough to be read by the world.

Some people who are kind and endearing, some known, some unknown, say that my work reminds them of Tagore and Bachchan, O. Henry and RK Narayan. I am not disillusioned by such comparisons. I remember how people would call me Wasim Akram when I was in the second standard because I was the only left arm bowler in the locality. I was also compared to Rahul Dravid once when I didn’t get out and didn’t make any run for nearly two hours.

But yes I have improved, mostly due to practice and because I love writing as much as I love the girl I love. Irrespective of how mediocre and imperfect I might be, I don’t write to become famous or to get rich (nor am I famous or rich).

I just write because that is what I do even when I am stuck in a traffic jam at the end of a shitty day. At times, when I see people getting popular, being read, receiving comments and people who are more resourceful than me in terms of talent and else, it makes me envious for two seconds. But it is only until I have not held my pen. To write and dismiss and to write again until I am immersed back into my world, where I am immortal and omnipotent. Where I am a god. God of small things and big alike!

I want to keep scribbling until the day I sit on my commode for the last time like the king of seven kingdoms. And the day I can’t even do that, I would better be dead.

Sherman Alexie’s Top 10 Tips for Writers

Sherman Alexie is the author of 24 books including Reservation Blues which received an American Book Award in 1996. His first young adult fiction novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, has sold over one million copies.

In the September 2010 issue of Writer’s Digest magazine Alexie shared the following advice for writers.

1. Don’t Google search yourself.

2. When you’ve finished Google searching yourself, don’t do it again.

3. Every word on your blog is a word not in your book.

4. Don’t have any writing ceremonies. They’re just a way to stop you from writing.

5. Turn your readings into events. Perform and write with equal passion.

6. Read 1,000 pages for every one you try to write.

7. In fiction, research is overrated. But that means readers will write you correcting all of your minor biographical, geographical and historical errors. If you like, make those corrections in the paperback, but don’t sweat it too much.

8. Don’t lose the sense of awe you feel whenever you meet one of your favorite writers. However, don’t confuse any writer’s talent with his or her worth as a human being. Those two qualities are not necessarily related.

9.  Subscribe to as many literary journals as you can afford.

10. When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author. Be effusive with your praise. Writing is a lonely business. Do your best to make it a little less lonely.

 

(Originally posted on Aerogramme Studio)

Writing Tips from Booker-Prize Winning Authors

Eleanor Catton, winner in 2013 for The Luminaries
“Read everything. You can learn from everything that has a narrative—books, of course, but also films, TV shows, computer games, advertisements, conversations, speeches, articles, the news. Read things you don’t like, and try to figure out why you don’t like them. Ask ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ as much as possible, and don’t be content with an easy answer.”

Hilary Mantel, winner in 2012 for Bring Up the Bodies and in 2009 for Wolf Hall.
“Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don’t notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they’re trying too hard to instruct the reader.”

Howard Jacobson, winner in 2010 for The Finkler Question
“The thing a writer will always tell you is you must write about what you know and that’s advice that must be heeded; you start from what you know. But the truth is we all know more than we think we know. What we know is not just the basic facts of our life. Because sometimes we have secret longings and yearnings, we want our life to be different, we wish the world were a different place. And part of what you’re doing when we are writing is you are describing our own experience of the world but you are also making the world different. It’s a wonderful thing to write because you are like a kind of God.  You are creating this world; your world and yet not quite your world. Writing is always reality up one, up a notch.”

Anne Enright, winner in 2007 for The Gathering
Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.”

Kiran Desai, winner in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss
“After a point you can’t go on perfecting something and polishing it and making it better, because you lose something in the process, the freshness of it, and I realised that even if it wasn’t completely perfect I had to leave it; it was enough–I couldn’t work on it any more. It’s a balance; if you perfect one thing you lose something else, and that’s the stage where I think you have to know when to stop.”

John Banville, winner in 2005 for The Sea
“When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere. Which is how it should be. Like Popeye, I am what I am.”

DBC Pierre, winner in 2003 for Vernon God Little
“Flowing dialogue has to be balanced with letting readers know which character is speaking; but dialogue with too many “he said”s and “she said”s is irritating. It’s a perennial challenge to clearly identify who’s speaking without lumbering the exchange with repetitious words. While the beginning of a dialogue should firmly show who speaks and who answers, if the conversation continues you will need some new tools to keep it natural, unobtrusive and rhythmic.”

Yann Martel, winner in 2002 for Life of Pi
“Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. You have to play around until you find something you’re comfortable with.”

Peter Carey, winner in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang and in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda
“First, turn off your television. The television is your enemy. It will stop you doing what you wish to do. If you wish to watch TV, you do not want to be a serious writer, which is fine.”

Margaret Atwood, winner in 2000 for The Blind Assassin
“You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.”

Ian McEwan, winner in 1998 for Amsterdam
“I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.”

Arundhati Roy, winner in 1997 for The God of Small Things
“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”

Roddy Doyle, winner in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
“Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph, until you get to page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it’s the job.”

Michael Ondaatje, co-winner in 1992 for The English Patient
“Very early on in my writing life I realized that if you’re going to write, the last thing you should think about is an audience. Otherwise you’re going to give the audience what they want as opposed to what you want to do or discover. The act of writing is so difficult anyway that you don’t want to add to it the imagined sense of five hundred people in a theater listening to you, or watching you, waiting to see what you do, like that Monty Python sketch about watching Thomas Hardy write his eleventh novel. ‘Oh no, he’s doodling again.”

Ben Okri, winner in 1991 for The Famished Road
“Storytellers ought not to be too tame.  They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society.  They are best in disguise.  If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.”

AS Byatt, winner in 1990 for Possession: A Romance
“The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you’re writing about. It doesn’t encumber you, it makes you free.”

Kingsley Amis, winner in 1986  for The Old Devils
“If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”

Thomas Kenneally, winner in 1982 for Schindler’s Ark
“My aphorism is ‘only begin.’ It’s hard to do if you have a job, but if you can find the time to write a number of days or nights a week, even if it’s just five hundred words – that process will help free up your subconscious. And that’s where so many good ideas come from, so many good characters, so many good connections between characters, so many great plot ideas.  You’ve got to use your conscious mind to refine it all, but a lot of good material comes from the unconscious, and to engage the unconscious you have to write a number of times a week to get the sub-conscious stirred up. I’ve got this idea that all the great stories are in our subconscious somewhere and they’ll come out if only we give them a chance.  Getting it published in the present climate is the heartbreak, but there’s always Amazon.”

Salman Rushdie, winner in 1981 for Midnight’s Children
“I have a rule that I offer to young writers. There must be no tropical fruits in the title. No mangoes, no guavas. None of those.”

Penelope Fitzgerald, winner in 1979 for Offshore
“I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they’re about people the writer doesn’t like very much.”

Iris Murdoch, winner in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea
“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”

Nadine Gordimer, co-winner in 1974 for The Conservationist
“What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.”

PH Newby, winner in 1969 for Something to Answer For
“Whatever large ideas the novelist may have about his message, he is not a novelist unless he remembers why people read fiction, and presents characters and situations in a vivid way that will interest readers who are not primarily interested in his message. This is (to give it a grand term) the art of fiction.”

this post originally appeared on Aerogramme Writer’s Studio

6 Things You Should Always put on your Resume!

There are things you should show on your resume and some you should not. It depends a lot on the nature of the job and many other factors.

But, there are certain points that you MUST ALWAYS PUT ON YOUR RESUME whether you are an IT professional or a writer.

Contact information.

This may seem obvious – but candidates sometimes forget to include basic information, like their email address, or they bury it at the very bottom. “Include your name, phone number, email, and URL to your LinkedIn profile right at the top of the page,” says Nicole. “And you don’t need to include your home address.”

Executive resume writer Mary Elizabeth Bradford suggests including just one phone number and email address. “Some people will include their home and cell numbers, for example – but I find multiple contact choices to be confusing. Make it easy for your reader to understand how to contact you.”

Keywords from the job posting.

You’ll want to include (without making it look like you did a lot of “copying” and “pasting”) some keywords and phrases from the job posting. This is especially important if the employer uses a resume scanning system.

Accomplishments and achievements.

Employers need to know what you’ve done to contribute to the growth of your department, team, and company in order to determine if your strengths align with the needs and responsibilities of their company and the job opening, Nicolai explains.

Your career narrative.

“No matter if you are constructing a functional resume or a chronological resume, some kind of professional history is critical,” says Bradford. “But make sure your story makes for a more interesting read.”Allison Joyce/Getty ImagesMetrics are a great way to prove your achievements.

Metrics.

“Employers need numbers to be able to fully evaluate the scope of your bandwidth,” says Nicolai. “No position is exempt from measuring results. And metrics help employers determine if a person is capable of leading a team, managing clients, or growing the business.”

Metrics are also a great way to prove your achievements.

Relevant URLs. 

Depending on the field or position you’re applying for, it may be useful to include links to your work (articles you’ve written, websites you’ve designed, photographs you’ve taken, etc.).

“Candidates need to show up on paper as though they have already been screened by a recruiter,” Nicolai says. “Today, recruiters and gatekeepers are stretched to the gills and do not have the time to conduct lengthy initial phone screens to understand detailed specific information.”

Knowing that, your goal should be to include enough information using as few words as possible, says Bradford. “Less is more in most cases and writing ‘too much’ is generally the most common mistake I see. You don’t want key attributes getting lost in a sea of information just because you have ‘seen and done it all from the bottom up.'”

Use your ideal career position as your touchtone and write to that, she suggests. “Accentuate the skills, abilities, metrics and leadership abilities that make the best case for you being in that next position and minimize the rest.”

(originally published on Business Insider.)

Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling

Originally tweeted by Emma Coats some three years ago, here is an agenda of storytelling by none other than PIXAR studios.

Hope you find it useful.

1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.

3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

8. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

12. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.

17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.

18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

21. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?

22. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

(originally posted on Aerogramme Writer’s Studio in 2013)

Best Quotes about the writers for the writers by the writers!

These are great words of wisdom by great writers,

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
—William S. Burroughs

“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
—Steve Almond, WD

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell

“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
—Hunter S. Thompson

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
—George Orwell

“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”
—Roald Dahl, WD

“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
—Robert Benchley

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
—Virginia Woolf

“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.”
—Stephen King, WD (this quote is from an interview with King in our May/June 2009 issue)

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
—Peter Handke

“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”
—William Zinsser, WD

“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
—William Faulkner

“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
—Gore Vidal

“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
—John Updike, WD

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
—Samuel Johnson

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
—Elmore Leonard

“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”
—Larry L. King, WD

“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.”
—Allegra Goodman

“I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”
—Richard Ben Cramer

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”
—Doris Lessing

“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”
—Jules Renard

“Style is to forget all styles.”
—Jules Renard

“I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
—Tom Clancy, WD

“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”
—Eudora Welty, WD

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
—Lawrence Block, WD

“Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.”
—Leslie Gordon Barnard, WD

“If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”
—Fred East, WD

“Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.”
—Leigh Brackett, WD

“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, WD

“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”
—Stephen King, WD

“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.”
–Jack Kerouac, WD

“Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”
—Jim Tully, WD

“All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life. You can do that in 20 minutes, and 15 inches. I still remember a piece that the great Barry Bearak did in The Miami Herald some 30 years ago. It was a nothing story, really: Some high school kid was leading a campaign to ban books he found offensive from the school library. Bearak didn’t even have an interview with the kid, who was ducking him. The story was short, mostly about the issue. But Bearak had a fact that he withheld until the kicker. The fact put the whole story, subtly, in complete perspective. The kicker noted the true, wonderful fact that the kid was not in school that day because “his ulcer was acting up.” Meaning of life, 15 inches.”
—Gene Weingarten, WD

“Beware of advice—even this.”
—Carl Sandburg, WD

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
—Harper Lee, WD

“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”
—Andre Dubus III, WD (this quote is from an interview with Dubus in our July/August 2012 issue)

“Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through—originality.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD

“People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.”
—R.L. Stine, WD (this quote is from an interview with Stine that ran in our November/December 2011 issue)

“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“Writers are always selling somebody out.”
—Joan Didion

“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
—Robert A. Heinlein

“Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.”
—George Singleton

“There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.”
—Jim Thompson

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”
—May Sarton

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
—William Carlos Williams

“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”
—Andre Gide

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
—Elmore Leonard

“You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop—H₂O. The reader will get it.”
—George Singleton

“When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”
—Margaret Laurence

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
—Mark Twain

“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”
—Patrick Dennis

“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
—Annie Dillard

“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”
—Angela Carter

“I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.”
—William Zinsser

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
—Ernest Hemingway

“Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”
—Henry David Thoreau

“You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.”
—Marie de Nervaud, WD

“Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.”
—James Alexander Thom

“Writers live twice.”
—Natalie Goldberg

And then there is me and my crap!

“Write Shit! Write crap! But please WRITE!  Dont stop! Write for the sake of those little newborn words which are screaming inside you. Be a good parent to them.  Don’t suppress their voice. Scream with them. Make the world listen! ”

– Anurag Chaudhary

12 habits of highly productive writers- By Rachel Toor

Many writers I know love Joyce Carol Oates—some even refer to her as JCO, as if she were a brand as recognizable as CBS or BMW. But just as often, the mention of her name is met by groans and complaints about how much she’s written. Her productivity seems like an affront.

When someone’s doing a lot more than you, you notice it. It brings out your petty jealousy. And if you’re like me (occasionally petty and jealous), it might make you feel crappy about yourself. Which is, let’s face it, ridiculous. No one else’s achievements take anything away from yours, or mine. The fact that another writer is working hard and well should be nothing more than inspiration, or at least a gentle prod.

So I started to think about the practices of highly productive writers. What are the personality traits and habits that help people crank out the pages? Here are a few that occur to me:

1. They reject the notion of “writer’s block” the way others shun gluten.

Some people are truly unable to tolerate that vilified protein, but many more leap after a culprit to explain their dyspepsia or inability to refrain from carby deliciosity. Maybe cutting out a big food group makes it easier to stick to a diet than being careful about portion sizes of crusty bread and pasta puttanesca. Certainly there’s a comfort in diagnosis, relief in the idea that suffering can be linked to a thing that others also get. Likewise, it’s a lot easier to say that the muse has gone AWOL than to admit that writing is hard and requires discipline and sacrifice.

Productive writers don’t reach for excuses when the going gets hard. They treat writing like the job it is. They show up, punch the clock, and punch out. Nothing romantic about it. They give themselves a quota; sometimes it’s butt-in-chair time, sometimes a word count. Simple math allows you to figure out how quickly 1,000 words a day adds up to a book-length work. These writers know how to use deadlines, whether external or self-imposed, to stay on track.

2. They don’t overtalk their projects.

Some writers like to talk about writing more than they actually like to write. Others dine out for years on their topics—giving conference papers, writing journal articles, applying for grants—until they’ve all but lost interest in what they are supposed to be writing. One prolific academic writer told me that he often gets interested in something and spends a few months working before he realizes it’s not going to pan out. He puts it aside without ever having talked about it. Only once it’s well under way will he discuss it. I have been accused of being “secretive” about my work. I’m not; some pieces benefit from yammering, and others don’t.

3. They believe in themselves and their work.

Perhaps it’s confidence, perhaps it’s Quixote-like delusion, but to be a prolific writer you have to believe that what you’re doing matters. If you second-guess at every step, you’ll soon be going backward. A writer I know likes to say that over the years he has “trained” his family not to expect him to show up for certain things, because they know his work comes first. You have to be willing to risk seeming narcissistic and arrogant, even if you don’t like to think of yourself that way. The work takes priority.

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And they might hate themselves a little if they slack off. Along with the necessary arrogance and narcissism, a dollop of self-hatred goes a long way toward getting stuff done. You have to believe it’s your job to be productive and to feel bad if you’re not.

4. They know that a lot of important stuff happens when they’re not “working.”

I love this passage from Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair: “I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily 500 words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow, undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.”

Productive writers have been through the cycle enough to know it’s a cycle, and sometimes you figure out problems while you’re walking the dog. They know to trust that and don’t get twitchy when the pages stop piling up.

5. They’re passionate about their projects.

Too much scholarly work is obviously produced without heat. Some academics take so long to finish a book they can barely remember what interested them about the topic in the first place. Productive people become impatient and seek out new thrills. They like to learn stuff.

Chipping away at something for years or decades can lead to a pile of dust or to a finely made and intricately tooled piece of art. It’s often hard to know which one you’re working toward. It can help to delude yourself into channeling Donatello or Brancusi even if what you’re looking at seems like a bunch of shavings.

6. They know what they’re good at.

Dave Eggers wrote that for him, at least at the beginning of his career, writing fiction was like driving a car in a clown suit. It’s important to find the project and the approach that will work for you and will let you use your own real and valuable skills to best effect.

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Perhaps academics find themselves traumatized by writing because they’re trying to sound like some “smart” version of themselves. Their writing comes off as inauthentic. Often, however, these same people can talk about their ideas in a way that makes you want to listen for hours. The best writing is a conversation between author and reader. Too much scholarly work reads like someone driving a car in a clown suit. If these folks could write more like they teach—be themselves on the page—the work would surely benefit.

7. They read a lot, and widely. 

I’m always amazed when professors say they don’t have time to read for fun. How else can you attempt to write something good? If you don’t think that your work should be a pleasure to read, most of us won’t want to read it. Productive writers (should) pay attention to craft and read to steal tricks and moves from authors they admire. Reading becomes a get-psyched activity for writing. Anyone who’s ever assigned (or done) an exercise in imitation knows that.

8. They know how to finish a draft. 

As with relationships, beginnings are exciting and easy, full of hope and promise. Middles can get comfortable. You fall into a routine and, for a while, that can be its own kind of fun. But then many of us hit a wall. Whether it’s disillusion, boredom, or self-doubt, we crash into stuckness. Productive authors know that they have to keep going through the hard parts and finish a complete draft. At least you’ve got something to work from.

9. They work on more than one thing at once.

Of course, when you hit that wall, it’s tempting to give up and start on something new and exciting (see above, re: beginnings are easy). While that can lead to a sheaf of unfinished drafts, it can also be useful. Some pieces need time to smolder. Leaving them to turn to something short and manageable makes it easier to go back to the big thing. Fallowing and crop rotation lead to a greater harvest.

10. They leave off at a point where it will be easy to start again. 

Some writers quit a session in the middle of a sentence; it’s always easier to continue than to begin. If you know where you’re headed the next time you sit down, you’ll get there faster. There’s an activation-energy cost to get things brewing. Lower it however you can.

11. They don’t let themselves off the hook.

If only I had three hours of quiet every day. If only I had the perfect office. If only my hair weren’t so frizzy. People often say to writers, “Oh, I’d love to write a book, if only I had the time,” as if it’s merely a question of having a leisurely spell to sit noodling at your computer.

You have time only if you make it a priority. Productive writers don’t allow themselves the indulgence of easy excuses. When they start to have feelings of self-doubt—I can’t do this, it’s too hard, I’ll never write another good sentence—they tell themselves to stop feeling sorry for themselves and just do the work.

12. They know there are no shortcuts, magic bullets, special exercises, or incantations.

I am suspicious of strategies that diminish the time and effort required to do good work. Write your dissertation in five minutes a day? Complete a book in 60 days? Maybe you’d like to try the KitKat Diet, or purchase a lovely bridge?

There are no tricks to make it easier, just habits and practices you can develop to get it done.

This post originally appeared at The Chronicle of Higher Education.