Quantity Creates Quality
The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of stories. If you can write one short story a week – it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.
Don’t Think Too Hard
The intellect is a great danger to creativity … because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth – who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads, “Don’t think!” You must never think at a typewriter – you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.
Writer’s Block is just a Warning that you’re doing the Wrong Thing.
If you have writers’ block you can cure it this evening by stopping what you’re doing and writing something else. You picked the wrong subject.
Writing is not a Serious Business
It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun at it. Ignore the authors who say, oh my god, what work, oh Jesus Christ, you know. No, to hell with that. It is not work. If it’s work, stop it, and do something else.
Read these three things every night
For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed, read one short story. Then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems. Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. But one poem a night, one short story a night, and one essay a night for the next 1,000 nights. I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own. But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay – at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?
Metaphors Make Great Stories
I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor. I grew up on Greek myths, Roman myths, Egyptian myths and the Norse Eddas. So, when you have influences like that, your metaphors are so strong that people can’t forge them.
Learn from the Lizards
Run fast, stand still. This is the lesson from lizards. For all writers. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort of a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth dead-falling or tiger-trapping.
Study the Work of the Masters
I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say, How’d she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together?
Read Many Short Stories from the Turn of the Century
But stay away from the most modern anthologies of short stories, because they’re slices of life. They don’t go anywhere, they don’t have any metaphor.
You Don’t Become a Writer by Taking Writing Classes
I took a writing course in summer school in 1939, when I was in high school. But it didn’t work. The secret of writing was, to go and live in the library two or four days a week for ten years. I graduated from the library having read every single book in it. And along the way I wrote every day of every week of every month, for every year. And in ten years, I became a writer.
Write When the Idea Strikes
I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, it’s own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being.
Take Off the Safety Harness
You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Write Only For Yourself
You can’t write for other people. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, make a list of ten things you hate and tear them apart in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them.
Mayur’s notes
As you list the things you love or hate, answer the following:
What do you love or hate about it?
How does it make you feel?
What would you do to it, if you saw it physically?
How would its existence or nonexistence make the world better?
Don’t be Afraid to Write Crap Either
I’ve written thousands of words that no one will ever see. I had to write them in order to get rid of them. But then I’ve written a lot of other stuff too. So the good stuff stays, and the old stuff goes.
Get Comfortable with the Idea of Work
Let’s take a long look at that faintly repellent word WORK. It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now, you should not become its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects.
Write a Little Every Day
Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, well, I’ll be damned. I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad – you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned. It’s been a good year.
