On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.
The basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.
My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun. Oh, man—who farted, right?
Writing is refined thinking.
The hours we spend talking about writing is time we don’t spend actually doing it.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose.
Writing is at its best—always, always, always—when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer.
For the beginning writer in particular, it’s wise to eliminate every possible distraction.
[Writing is] just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks.
It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to.
I think locale and texture are much more important to the reader’s sense of actually being in the story than any physical description of the players.
It’s not about the setting, anyway—it’s about the story, and it’s always about the story.
see an old thing in a new and vivid way.
Fresh images and simple vocabulary.
Never tell us a thing if you can show us
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event [or product], which is to say character-driven.
Once you get beyond the short story, the story should always be the boss.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once said, “Murder your darlings,”
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
Your job during or just after the first draft is to decide what something or somethings yours is about. Your job in the second draft—one of them, anyway—is to make that something even more clear.
take a couple of days off—go fishing, go kayaking, do a jigsaw puzzle—and then go to work on something else. Something shorter,
A complete change of direction and pace in the second draft I’ll want to add scenes and incidents that reinforce that meaning.
All that thrashing around has to go if I am to achieve anything like a unified effect.
Pace is the speed at which your narrative unfolds.
(kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings).
2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”
If you can’t get out ten per cent of it while retaining the basic story and flavor, you’re not trying very hard. The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing
You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.