Best Advice to Aspiring Fiction Writers
"To keep in mind that throughout most of the history of man writing was a vocation, something done for the love of it, and because it fed the soul of the writer and informed the minds and hearts of his or her readers. I say this because it is very hard to make a living as a writer, and if either that is your goal, or the measuring rod by which you render judgment on your art, then in all likelihood, you will be miserable during all your fleeting days on earth. I am very lucky in that I've been able to make a living as a writer, but that doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of aspiring writers, for any number of reasons, will not be able to do so. The joy is in doing the work, and then, if you're very, very fortunate, being able to share the work with others in a published form. Beyond that, there's unlikely ever to be much gravy in the bowl."
--Thomas H. Cook
Interview with Mystery Guild Bookclub
From Ellen Gilchrist, Journal: Falling Through Space
"I tell writing students that the first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all of that, maybe no one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth. This is what it means to be a writer. It is an exciting and jealous obsession."
From Erica Jong, How To Save Your Own Life:
"...there is no 'your poem, my poem.' There is no 'your line, my line.' There is the language, and we are its vessels. We speak for the mouths that can't speak, we speak their thoughts -- not our own. That's when we're writing, when we're pure. When we're not writing we worry about ego, ego, ego... and the critics talk about ego, ego, ego. Whose by-line? Whose book? How long? Which prize? But the gift for language has no particular by-line -- just as a river doesn't care if it stays in a given state. It will flow across boundary lines, down mountains, from one country into another, from one civilization into another. The small minds sit there labeling, arguing about naming things, arguing about by-lines, but the river just keeps flowing...
The river has the only rights there are. And the river corresponds to the rights of the readers. Nobody else has any authority at all over the river...it is only river and reader."
"This discovery of the complexity of human nature was accompanied by another -- the discovery of the complexity and irrationality of human motive, the discovery that one could love and hate simultaneously, be honest and cheap, be arrogant and humble, be any pair of opposites that one had supposed to be mutually exclusive. This, I believe, is not common knowledge and would be incomprehensible to many. It has always been known, of course, by the dramatists and the novelist. It is, in fact, a knowledge far more disturbing to other people than to writers, for to writers it is the grist to their mills."
-- Alan Paton
"The Challenge of Fear"
Saturday Review, '67
"The writer must be willing, above everything else, to take chances, to risk making a fool of himself -- or even to risk revealing the fact he is a fool." --Jessamyn West
"In his own clumsy way, the first thing a writer must do is to love all mankind, even when he hates individual ones. Some of the characters I've created I hate very much, but it's not for me to judge them, to condemn them; they are there, they are part of the scene that we all live in. We can't abolish evil by refusing to mention these people."
--William Faulkner
"I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them." --W. Somerset Maugham
"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon." --Tom Stoppard, from a newspaper interview (The Guardian - 1988)
From: "The Finishing School"--novel by Gail Godwin, a character explaining what art is to the artist: "It's a love that can never be satisfied, more like a yearning. Addressing a powerful and constant state of yearning that torments, yet artists love this torment. Need it. Because they understand that being able to feel this yearning so exquisitely is a secret strength. This is the power of the artist. If you are an artist you learn how to trap the yearning and put it where you want it, put it where it goes. That's the secret all true artists come to know. That is the redemptive power of art. It can make something haunting and beautiful out of something that, in real life, was painful and degrading."
"Sooner or later, every artist encounters rejection -- even the most famous. If you persevere a lifetime with your work, it must go through periods of being out of sync with the politics or literary theories of your time. And you must work past that, even if it means rejection. Politics change. But the time to work can never be brought back. Nabokov would be astonished to see his work in print all over Russia. He predicted that would never happen.
Rejection from outside is always better than inwardly
rejecting your writer-self. Your writer-self is all you
have to deal with. If you deprive yourself of that, you
will never come to know how ultimately unimportant outer
rejection is. But if you ally yourself with the forces of
rejection, you will have committed creative suicide. The
*-----* will not only have got you down, they will have
killed you, with your own enthusiastic complicity."
--Erica Jong, 'Fear of Fifty'
"How do I set my priorities when all things seem equally important and/or urgent? While our children were living at home, their needs came first. After all, they didn't ask to be born. We asked for them. For me, that meant writing part-time around the kids' schedules." --Elizabeth Lowell
"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say." - Raymond Chandler, 1950.
"But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. . . . If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame."
--Charlotte Bronte