Sometimes we use shorthand to remind ourselves of nuanced/layered truths. They’re not dumbed-down or simplistic, just highly compacted, concentrated, essential. If you’re a writer (and most of you are, I think), you’ll have collected your own pocketful. Below are some of mine.
1. “A writer is a reader moved to emulation.” [Saul Bellow]1
Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. Read voraciously, read outside your comfort zone, read like a writer (one eye on story, one on craft).
2. A good story is “a vivid, continuous dream.” [John Gardner]2
Of course, vivid. But also, continuous. Keep your reader inside the dream, inside the bubble. Skip the same-old, same-old. Don’t waste our time, don’t betray our trust. Fascinate us. Keep us reading—that’s your only job!
3. A story is a thing.
It’s an art object, constructed of words. You build it and re-build it over many sittings―reconsidering, fixing, adding stuff, chopping stuff out.
Famous painter struggling to write a poem: I can’t understand it, I have such good ideas! Famous poet: Ah, you see, there’s your problem. Poems aren’t made of ideas, they’re made of words.
Like other objects, your story has qualities you could pinpoint with adjectives―brisk, peppy, orderly, dreamy, airless, sluggish, timid, smoldering, careening, bullish, fizzy, impenetrable, crude, austere, jittery, gooey, shimmery . . .
4. No voiceless grist. [Donald Newlove]3
Here’s the full quote: “Do you want to wake up thirty years later facing a shelf of voiceless grist with your name on the covers?” As a reader: Listen for the voice. Who’s telling the story? And why? As a writer: Listen for the voice, listen to the voice. Who are you when you’re telling this story? Talk to us.
5. A memorable character is “a bright, human image.” [William Gass]4
Neat plots and lovely writing are terrific, but fiction sticks to our bones when we’re given characters we care about, ones we know intimately, ones we can’t stop watching and listening to.
6. Action reveals character.5
People do what they do because of who they are. A different character would handle things differently, make different choices, pay attention to different facts, be injured or amused or baffled by different things.
7. There’s no such thing as description, there’s only construction. [William Gass]6
Your story takes place not in the so-called “real world,” but in an experimental world of your making. Everything in it is there because you say it is. Nothing is unimportant. If it’s raining in your story, that’s because this particular story can only occur in the rain. How do you know what belongs? Immerse yourself in the moment. Close your eyes, be there. Tell what you see [and don’t tell what we already know]. Give the screwy details that make the moment what it is.
8. Reading is linear.
Stories unfold sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, section by section. Not everything is revealed at once. Find the shape of your story, the pattern for its revelations. Make it feel aimed, purposeful. Think: beginning, middle, end―this applies not just to the whole, but also to each part, down to the sentence level. Beginning, middle, end. Beginning, middle, end.
9. Make it decision-rich.7
Even if your writing doesn’t seem very original as you start, the more choices you make, the more it becomes yours. Revising is the act of passing the writing again and again through the filter of who you are.
10. Remember the body.
Keep the writing physical. Give us images we can see, things we can touch. Prefer the short hard Anglo-Saxon words—make them your default until you need an abstraction.
11. No extra words.
12. Triggering subject, true subject. [Richard Hugo]8
Something gets you started―an event, an image, a memory. As you write you move toward your true subject, what it’s really about. If you stop before you get there, you don’t really have a story. Think of the dual meaning of the word “passage’—don’t be a writer who disembarks too soon.
13. “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” [E.L. Doctorow]9
You can’t see everything at once. You may know what comes next, but not what comes after that. Living with ignorance can be frustrating, even debilitating. But the longer you spend with your story, the more it will reveal itself to you. For a writer, ignorance is a necessary evil. Without ignorance there’s no possibility of discovery.
14. You make your own luck.
As Woody Allen famously said, “Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.” Good things happen to those who sit at their writing desks regularly.
15. It’s not a race.
There’s always someone smarter, faster, prettier, luckier, more gifted, more sophisticated, more driven, more handsomely rewarded. Be that as it may, you have your own work to do. Do it.
In honor of that thought, a sign I saw in Iceland:
I’d love to tell you where this came from but I’ve never tracked it down. Saul Bellow said a lot of smart things about writing, so this is probably his—and if it isn’t, it’s still true. Earlier in your life, something you read—or maybe even the look of the words in print, the heft of the book in your hands— something lit up a certain batch of your neurons. You felt it. That, you thought, I want that.
The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (1984).
First Paragraphs (1992).
Fiction and the Figures of Life (1978).
This is the oldest principle of fiction writing. It remains true and fundamental. But let’s add two amendments:
a) It applies best to traditional story-making. Certain newer strands of writing rely less on characters—some flash fiction, some postmodern writing, some writing I’m not sure what to call. We can be delighted or moved by it, but for reasons other than the pathos surround-ing a character’s choices—for, perhaps, the genius of its construction/design, for its collage/ juxtaposition/collison of images that impact us like visual art does.
b) In an upcoming three-parter on voice I’ll make this point again: If action reveals character, and one of the three kinds of action is speech (physical and mental action being the other two), then every word of a first-person story is an act of characterization.
Fiction and the Figures of Life (1978).
Many years when I was learning backgammon a friend and I played in a small tournament. I had two weak opponents and was stunned to find myself in the final round. The guy I faced was no beginner. I’d read the backgammon books and knew what the conventional wisdom said to do, but this guy’s moves seemed confusingly unconventional. No matter, I lost in jig time. Driving home I talked this out with my friend and had a kind of epiphany, and later saw how it applied to writing.
Every turn in backgammon starts with rolling the dice. You have no control over the numbers that turn up; the skill comes in seeing how to use the two number. Because luck is involved, a short game tends to increase the role luck plays, where longer games are more likely to depend on the canniness of a player’s choices. My opponent’s moves made the games messier, more complex in order to downplay luck and play up his skill. I came to see that this dynamic also applied to fiction writing. You can start with a plot/character situation that seems overfamiliar/stale/ordinary but if you stay with it long enough, if you put it through the filter of who you are enough times, it will become one-of-a-kind, yours.
The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (1979).
E. L. Doctorow, The Art of Fiction No. 94 in The Paris Review (Issue 101, Winter 1986)
Lots of great advice here! I particularly like the one about character. It reminds me of the stories (books, films, video games) that have such well crafted characters that you miss then when it’s all over. I shall bookmark this piece so I can revisit it often. Thank you!
Epic nuggets, thank you. QSV.