The Writing of "Ulysses"

All in all I calculate that I must have spent nearly 20,000 hours in writing Ulysses.

James Joyce

Norman Mailer On Reading Reviews

I'd never dream of not reading reviews. It's like not looking at a naked woman if she happens to be standing in front of her open window.

Norman Mailer

Ernest Hemingway on Writing During the Summer

Summer is a discouraging time to work--you don't feel death coming on as the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.

Ernest Hemingway 

Raymond Chandler On Writing In The Morning

I write when I can and don't write when I can't; always in the morning or early part of the day. You get very gaudy ideas at night but they don't stand up.

Raymond Chandler 

Henry Miller's Writing Secret

I don't believe in draining the reservoir. I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say. I know that to sustain those true moments of insight one has to be highly disciplined, lead a disciplined life.

Henry Miller 

Are Unpublished Novelists Real Writers?

If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a novelist and never will be.

George V. Higgins.

Writers Never Die

Writers never die while people still quote them.

Gregory David Roberts

Are We All Creative?

Creativity is as natural to human beings as having blood and bone.

Julia Cameron

Do You Enjoy Writing?

I have never been one of those "writing is fun" people. Writing has never been a pleasure for me.

Reynolds Price 

Norman Mailer On Responding to Letters

 An author [who is well-known] will receive as many as several hundred letters a year from strangers. [Today it's emails.] Usually they want something: will you read their works, or listen to a life-story and write it.

     There are happy paradoxes to being successful as a writer. For one thing, you don't have much opportunity to read good books (it's too demoralizing when you're at sea on your own work) and you also come to dread letter-writting. Perhaps ten times a year, a couple of days are lost catching up on mail, and there's little pleasure in it. You are spending time that could have been given to more dedicated writing, and there are so many letters to answer! Few writers encourage correspondents. My reply to a good, thoughtful, even generous communication from someone I do not know is often short and apologetic.

Norman Mailer

Got An Idea For a Book Or Article?

Ask a professional writer about ideas. In all likelihood, he'll ask, "Which ideas?" because he's got a million of them, and his biggest problem is choosing one.

Richard Curtis

Writing Books For Middle-Grade Children

Middle-grade fiction (ages 9-13) is perhaps the most satisfying category for a writer. Children are still children, but their curiosity if unbounded and the writer who can enthrall them will be cherished. Statistics have shown that this age is also known for having the most readers as a group. To satisfy these voracious and varied readers, think about writing thrillers, literary novels, fantasy and science fiction, gripping historical fiction, humor, and books about contemporary problems.

Olga Litowinsky

One Great Book Doesn't Make One A Great Writer

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer--just the writer of a great book.

Anthony Burgess

Market Oriented Publishing

Trivia has swamped contemporary literary life and become, it seems, more important than the books. A book's blurb is more important than the book itself, the author's photograph on the book jacket is more important than its content, the author's appearance in wide-circulation newspapers and on TV is more important than what the author has actually written.

     Many writers feel increasingly uncomfortable in such a literary landscape, densely populated with publishers, editors, agents, distributors, brokers, publicity specialists, bookstore chains, "marketing people," television cameras, photographers. The writer and his reader--the two most important links in the chain--are more isolated than ever.

Dubravka Ugresic

Writers Have to Live With Rejection

When you get used to being disappointed, the recovery time gets shorter, the time you need before you get back to work gets shorter and shorter.

Colson Whitehead 

James Thurber on Why He Wrote

I write basically because it's so much fun.

James Thurber 

Write What You Know

I have always tried to keep the setting of my novels as far as possible within the confines of my own experience.

Ngio Marsh 

Achieving Literary Fame

My idea of fame is to get the books out to the pubic so they can read them.

T. C. Boyle 

Some Novelists, Before They Start a New Book, Know How It Will End

I almost know how a book is going to end before I start. In most cases, I have a good last paragraph before I start on page one.

William Boyd 

In Novels Setting is Important

I have always tried to keep the settings of my novels as far as possible within the confines of my own experience.

Ngaio Marsh 

The Value Of Primary Documentation In Journalism

Secondary sources are most useful when they lead to primary documents. The legislative hearing transcript would be a primary document as would be a real estate deed, political candidate's campaign finance report, lawsuit, insurance policy, and discharge certificate from the military. Documents can be just like human sources because they are prepared by humans. However, unlike humans, documents do not talk back and do not claim to have been misquoted.

Steve Weinberg 

The Writer's Need To Write

When I can't write, I feel so empty.

John Steinbeck 

Children's Books Make Good Movies

Children's books typically make for better movies than anything made for adults.

Alice Gregory 

The Graphic Novel: Mainly Visual Art Or Literature?

"Graphic Novel" is a perfectly serviceable phrase, but it expresses an unmistakable and unfortunate bias, emphasizing the literary identify of a given book at the expense of its visual essence.

A. O. Scott 

Who Is Worthy of a Biography?

The short story writer, playwright, and novelist deal with private life. They deal with ordinary people and elevate these people into our consciousness. The nonfiction writer has traditionally dealt with people in public life, names that are known to us. [This is not always the case. For example, four of my nonfiction books are about ordinary, nonpublic people.]

Gay Talese who

Short Stories Should Not Be Confusing

Deliberately puzzling or confusing a short story reader may keep him reading for a while, but at too great an expense. Even just an "aura" of mystery in a short story is usually just a lot of baloney. Who are these people? What are they up to? Provoking such questions from a reader can be a writer's way of deferring exposition until he feels the reader is ready for the explanation of it all. But more likely it's just fogging things up. A lot of beginning writers' fiction is like of beginners' poetry: deliberately unintelligible as to make the shallow seem deep.

Rust Hills

Editing Your Own Writing

I hate editing. I love to write, but I hate to reread my stuff. To revise. And most students do, too. It's a killer.

Barry Hannah 

Real Life Versus Fiction

Life and fiction are different. Life has no obligation to make things seem real, since things in life just are real, whether they're believable or not. In fiction, though, things and events have got to be handled in such a way as, no matter what, to make them seem believable and thus real. Life often doesn't do that work, since it doesn't have to.

Anne Larsen 

Stephen King on Getting Hit With The Talent Stick

I think God hits some people with the talent stick harder than He hits others. And it kills a lot of people. It's like dynamite: they blow up.

Stephen King 

Are Writers Suicidal?

Many people ask why a writer commits suicide. But I think that people who ask don't know the vanity and the nothingness of writing. I think it is very usual and natural for a writer to commit suicide, because in order to keep on writing he must be a very strong person.

Abe Kobo 

Choosing The Right Words For A Children's Book

As adults, we often forget that children can comprehend more than they can articulate, and we end up communicating to them below their level, leaving them bored. Or, the opposite can happen: children are growing up faster than we did and act very sophisticated although their vocabulary skills are underdeveloped. Striking the balance between writing below or above their level is tricky.

Alijandra Mogilner

The MFA Professor

Most writers who teach in academia aren't really academics. The majority of people who teach in MFA programs, I think, tend to be working writers who just need the gig.

James Hynes 

The Children's Book Reviewer

In essence, a children's book reviewer reads and writes with two audiences in mind: (1) adults who read reviews to help them select books for children and (2) the children themselves. It is important to remember that most books for children are created with the best intentions in mind. No one sets out to produce a crummy book that kids will hate. If this is your initial assessment of a book you're reviewing, it would be unfair and unwise to let it stand as your final assessment without a great deal of further consideration.

Kathleen T. Horning

Writing Out Of Revenge

[Some writers] insist that you should never write out of vengeance. I tell my students that they should always write out of vengeance, as long as they do so nicely. If someone has crossed them, if someone has treated them too roughly, I urge them to write about it.

Anne Lamott

The Most Erudite Cities

 For the third straight year, Alexandria, Virginia has topped Amazon.com's list of the best-read cities. The online retailer announced that Alexandria, where many government workers from nearby Washington reside, ranks Number 1 for sales of books, newspapers and magazines in cities of 100,000 or more. Miami was second, with residents there eager for books and magazines on self-help, health and mind, and body topics. Knoxville, Tennessee, was third; followed by Amazon's home city, Seattle; and Orlando, Florida. Rounding out the top 10 were many college towns: Ann Arbor, Michigan; Berkeley, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cincinnati; and Columbia, South Carolina.

Associated Press

Mystery Novels Should Not Have Romantic Subplots

Don't distract a mystery reader with a romantic subplot.

Florence King 

Anthony Burgess on Writer's Block

I can't understand the American literary block--as in Ralph Ellison or J.D. Salinger--unless it means that the blocked man isn't forced economically to write (as the English writer, lacking campuses and grants, usually is) and hence can afford the luxury of fearing the critics' pounce on a new work not as good as the last (or the first).

Anthony Burgess

Unreadable Novels

The joy of being a [literary] writer today is that you can claim your work's flaws are all there by design. Plot doesn't add up? It was never meant to; you were playfully reworking the conventions of traditional narrative. Your philosophizing makes no sense? Well, we live in an incoherent age after all. The dialogue is implausible? Comedy often is. But half the jokes fall flat?  Ah! Those were the serious bits. Make sure then, that your readers can never put a finger on what you are trying to say at any point in the book. Let them create their own text--you're just the one who gets paid for it.

B. R. Myers

The Pleasure Of Reading Good Dialogue

Good dialogue is such a pleasure to come across while reading, a complete change of pace from description and exposition and all that writing. Suddenly people are talking, and we find ourselves clipping along. And we have all the pleasures of voyeurism because the characters don't know we are listening. We get to feel privy to their inner workings without having to spend too much time listening to them think. I don't want them to think all the time on paper.

Anne Lamott

What Makes a Novel "Literary?" What Makes it "Commercial?"

Are we really supposed to rely on that crowd of editors and critics variously empowered to decide that is literary and what is commercial?…Isn't that literary-designating crowd broadly afflicted with pettiness, self-seriousness, social-class blinkers, an unsober love of language and erratic insightfulness? Sure. That great work gets overlooked and superfluous work gets deemed great is a given…Fiction that aims to, and often does, reach a wide audience and make a lot money is, in effect, Commercial Fiction. Fiction that, one argues, has a value that exceeds its commercial appeal would be Literary Fiction.

Rivka Galchen 

Master of Fine Arts Programs

M. F. A. programs have developed something of a gate-keeping function. The system is certainly flawed: Programs vary wildly in quality and cost. They can inspire inflated expectations--after all, the formalized study of writing isn't an alchemic formulas by which every student becomes Tolstoy, or even publishes a book. It is also the case that the M. F. A's workshop model, with its intense scrutiny of new work, can be crippling for some writers.

     Nonetheless, M. F. A. candidates spend a couple of years studying the craft of literature, immersed in its more esoteric and ineffable qualities, as readers and as writers. That's no small thing.

Ayana Mathis 

The World's Most Stupid Book

Think of what a difficulty it would be if you couldn't use the most common letter in your writing. In 1937, Ernest Vincent Wright took the challenge head on and wrote a book called Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E." Wright literally tied down the e  key on his typewriter and spent 165 days writing without e's (the e-filled subtitle was added later by the publisher.) Not that Wright lived a life of ease from his e-less accomplishment. He died the day Gadsby was published. [The plot of this self-published book revolves around the dying fictional city of Hills that is revitalized thanks to the protagonist, John Gadsby and a youth group he organizes. The book, sought after by book collectors, entered the public domain in 1968.]

Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo

One Reason to Write Creatively

I write, as I believe all artists perform their art, to exorcise internal conflicts and supplant reality with something more shapely and gratifying.

Ira Levin

Thornton P. Knowles on the Plotless Novel

A novel without a plot is like a car without an engine. It isn't going anywhere.

Thornton P. Knowles

Why Writers Drink

I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing or having trouble writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.

Natalie Goldberg 

Writing The How-To Article

Some kinds of writing are more debilitating than others, and it took me years to learn which, for me, is which. Instructional writing--the pure how-to article--is the worst.

John Jerome

Boswell's Self-Motivation to Write

As soon as I am awake, I remember my duty, and like a brisk mariner I give lash to indolence and bounce up with as much vivacity as if a pretty girl, amorous and willing, were waiting for me.

James Boswell 

The Writer's Vocabulary

A huge vocabulary is not always an advantage. Simple language, for some kinds of fiction at least, can be more effective than complex language which can lead to stiltedness or suggest dishonesty or faulty education.

John Gardner

Thornton P. Knowles on Writer's Block

To cure writer's block, I undress and write recklessly under a full moon. It works every time.

Thornton P. Knowles

The Will To Write

The consensus seems to be that drive is surprisingly more important than talent in producing creative work.

Dr. Alice W. Flaherty 

Writers On The Sets of Movies Based on Their Books

Producers of films tend to involve writers of books in the moviemaking process as little as possible, for the sensible reason that it's hard enough to make a film without having an interested amateur meddling in the process.

Tony Hillerman 

Facing The Blank Page

Some people when they sit down to write and nothing special comes, no good ideas, are so frightened that they drink a lot of strong coffee to hurry them up, or smoke packages of cigarettes, or take drugs or get drunk. They do not know that good ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and unstimulated you are, the slower the ideas come but the better they are.

Brenda Ueland

Norman Mailer on Basing Fictitious Characters On Real People

In practice I prefer to draw a character from someone I hardly know.

Norman Mailer

Books About John F. Kennedy

 Bad books by celebrity authors shouldn't surprise us [Bill O'Reilly's Killing Kennedy], even when the subject is an American president. The true mystery in Kennedy's case is why, 50 years after his death, highly accomplished writers seen unable to fix him on the page.

     For some, the trouble has been idolatry. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who wrote three magisterial volumes on Franklin Roosevelt and the new deal, attempted a similar history in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in The White House. Published in 1965, it has the virtues of immediacy, since Schlesinger, Kennedy's Harvard contemporary, had been on the White House staff, brought in as court historian. He witnessed many of the events he describes. But in his admiration for Kennedy, he became the chief architect of the Camelot myth and so failed, in the end, to give a persuasive account of the actual presidency.

     In 1993, the political journalist Richard Reeves did better. President Kennedy: Profile of Power is a minutely detailed chronicle of the Kennedy White House. As a primer on Kennedy's decision-making, like his handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis, the book is fascinating. What's missing is a picture of Kennedy's personal life, though Reeves includes a passing mention of Marilyn Monroe being sewn into the $5,000 flesh-colored, skintight dress she wore to celebrate the president's birthday at Madison Square Garden in 1962….

     Balancing out, or warring with, the Kennedy claque are the Kennedy haters, like Seymour M. Hersh and Garry Wills. In The Dark Side of Camelot, Hersh wildly posits connections between the Kennedys and the mob, while Wills, through he offers any number of brilliant insights into Kennedy and his circle of courtiers, fixates on the Kennedy brothers' (and father's) sexual escapades in The Kennedy Imprisonment.

     The sum total of this oddly polarized literature is a kind of void. Other presidents, good and bad, have been served well by biographers and historians. We have first-rate books on Jefferson on Lincoln, on Wilson, on both Roosevelts. Even unloved presidents have received major books: Johnson (Caro) and Richard Nixon (Wills, among others). Kennedy, the odd man out, still seeks his true biographer.

Jill Abramson

Writing Three Hours a Day Is Enough For One Novelist

All those I think who have lived as literary men--working daily as literary laborers--will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Anthony Trollope 

Science Fiction Writers, Lighten Up

"It's so easy to make money with science fiction stories that say civilization is garbage, our institutions will never be helpful, and your neighbors are all useless sheep who could never be counted on in a crisis," says David Brin, a science fiction writer who thinks we've gotten too fond of speculative technological bummers. Movies like "Blade Runner," "The Matrix," "Children of Men," and more recently "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent," all express some version of this dark world view.

     Neal Stephenson, the author of Cryponomicon, usually writes exactly those kinds of dystopian stories. In his fiction, he tends to explore the dark side of technology. But a couple of years ago he got a public wake up call.

     On stage at a writer's conference, Stephenson was complaining that there were no big scientific projects to inspire people these days. But Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, shot back, "You're the one slacking off." By "you", Crow meant science fiction writers.

Adam Wernick 

Biographies of Artists

What is the point of reading biographies of artists? Critics have frequently come down hard on them. They contend that the details of a life are helpless to explain the majesty of art. What matters are not the despairing childhoods and difficult relationships, the questions of whether a particular artist was altruistic or plainly cruel--but the object that emerged in the end, an object unburdened by life, succeeding or failing on the basis of its appeal to the eye.

Deborah Solomon 

Creative Writing Courses

One of the oddities of creative writing courses is that there exists no standard theory on how to teach creative writing.

John Gardner

Note To Writers: Inspiration Alone Is Not Enough

Many undergrads hang on tenaciously to the conviction that literature is produced spontaneously through inspiration alone.

Martin Russ

One Disadvantage of Writing in First Person

If a story centers on the narrator's ability to survive life-threatening dangers, some suspense will be lost in the first person because the character will have to survive to finish the story!

Sol Stein 

The Mystery of Writer's Block

Sometimes writer's block will pass by itself, mysteriously slouching off as silently as it came, and you'll never know why it appeared, or why it slogged away.

Sophy Burnham 

The Book Dedication

A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: "To my wife, by whose helpful criticism..." and so on. He said the dedication should really read: "To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper's instead of The Hardware Age."

Brenda Ueland

Why Academics Avoid Clear Writing

According to Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania, among academics, "obtuse writing...seems to yield higher prestige for the author." Armstrong has conducted a number of studies to test this hypothesis. In one, he asked twenty management professors to identify the more prestigious of two unidentified journals presented to them. The more readable journal (as determined by the Flesch Reading Ease Test) was judged the least prestigious. In another experiment, Armstrong rewrote the same journal article in two different forms. One he rated confusing and convoluted, the other concise and clear. A panel of thirty-two professors agreed that the confusing version reported a higher level of research. "Overall, the evidence is consistent with a common suspicion," concluded Armstrong. "Clear communication of one's research is not appreciated. Faculty are impressed by less readable articles." [Another reason for bad academic writing is that if the material is presented clearly, the true banality of its substance will be revealed.]

Ralph Keyes

Scenes As The Building Blocks Of Creative Nonfiction

  Scenes (vignettes, episodes, slices of reality, and so forth) are the building blocks of creative nonfiction--the primary factor that separates and defines literary and/or creative nonfiction from traditional journalism and ordinary lifeless prose.

     The uninspired writer will tell the reader about a subject place, or personality but the creative nonfiction writer will show that subject, place, or personality in action.

Lee Gutkind

Good Journalistic Interview Subjects

I hate writing about anyone who is familiar with the press or has a "story." I like to write about people who don't necessarily see what their story is, or what my interest might be. I like subjects who really know how to enjoy life or are immersed in whatever they are doing fully.

Adrian Nicole Leblanc good 

Norman Mailer On Becoming A Writer

 I'm now eighty [2002], but some people still regard me as a wild man. Even at my peak, that was only five to ten percent of my nature. The rest was work. I remember Elia Kazan saying one day at Actors Studio, "Here, we're always talking about the work. We talk about it piously. We say the work. The work. Well, we do work here, and get it straight: Work is a blessing." He said this, glaring at every one of us. And I thought, He's right. That's what it is. A blessing.

     Of course, if you ask what work is dependent upon, the key word, an unhappy one, is stamina. It's as difficult to become a professional writer as a professional athlete. It often depends on the ability to keep faith in yourself. One must be willing to take risks and try again. And it does need an enormous amount of ongoing working practice to be good at it. Since you are affected by what you read as a child and adolescent, it also takes a while to unlearn all sorts of reading reflexes that have led you into bad prose.

Norman Mailer

Learning To Write From Other Writers

Most writers like to talk, and one of the things they love to talk about is writing. In interviews and letters, in table talk and memoirs and manifestos, writers have always held forth in surprisingly full detail about how they do what they do. It adds up to a vast, largely untapped literature on technique.

Donald M. Murray 

The Blessings Of Not Being Able To Write

For a person to discover that she or he does not have a calling to write can be good news. Consider committing your life in an impossible difficult, underpaid profession that is not right for you.

Stephen Koch

Detective Fiction's Golden Age and "Trent's Last Case" By E. C. Bentley"

The well-known description "Golden Age" [of detective fiction] is commonly taken to cover the two decades between the First and Second Wars, but this limitation is unduly restrictive. One of the most famous detective stories regarded as falling within the Golden Age is Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley, published in 1913. The name of this novel is familiar to many readers who have never read it, and its importance is partly due to the respect with which it was regarded by practitioners of the time and its influence on the genre. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote that it "holds a very special place in the history of detective fiction, a tale of unusual brilliance and charm, startlingly original." Agatha Christie saw it as "one of the three best detective stories every written." Edgar Wallace described it as "a masterpiece of detective fiction," and G. K. Chesterton saw it as "the finest detective story of modern times." Today some of the tributes of his contemporaries seem excessive but the novel remains highly readable, if hardly as compelling as it was when first published, and its influence on the Golden Age is unquestionable.

P. D. James

Norman Mailer On Novelists as People

One of the cruelest remarks in the language is: Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. The parallel must be: Those who meet experience, learn to live; those who don't, write.

     The second remark has as much truth as the first--which is to say, some truth. Of course, many a young man has put himself in danger to pick up material for his writing, but as a matter to make one wistful, not one major American athlete, CEO, politician, engineer, trade-union official, surgeon, airline pilot, chess master, call girl, sea captain, teacher, bureaucrat, Mafioso, pimp, recidivist, physicist, rabbi, movie star, clergyman, or priest or nun has also emerged as a major novelist since the Second World War.

Norman Mailer

John Gardner On Plotting The Novel

The writer works out plot in one of three ways: by borrowing some traditional plot or an action from real life...by working his way back from his story's climax; or by groping his way forward from an initial situation....

     The writer who begins with a traditional story or some action drawn from life has part of his work done for him already. He knows what happened and, in general, why. The main work left to him is that of figuring out what part of the story (if not the whole) he wants to tell, what the most efficient way of telling it is, and why it interests him.

John Gardner

Avoid Award Winning Novels

Literary prize committees have always been unreliable judges of quality and any reader silly enough to buy a book for the stamp on the cover deserves a ghastly read.

B. R. Myers 

Romanticizing Novelists Who Die Young

Athletes and dancers accept that their carers will be short. But--rightly or wrongly--we think of writing as a spiritual exercise, a project coextensive with the writer's life. When such a project is cut off early, it will always feel incomplete, a glorious cathedral nonetheless missing a spire. The idea, like the image, is itself highly romantic. But it might help explain what is so poignant about a dead young writer.

Benjamin Moser 

In Fiction, Good Dialogue Is Action

Dialogue, when properly handled, is one of the most entertaining divisions of action. The man who speaks even one truly significant word is as much in action as the man who throws the villain over the cliff from the thundering express train.

Elwood Maren 

Writing As A Reason To Live

Writing is the only thing that makes me feel I'm not wasting my time sticking around.

Ernest Hemingway 

Why Do Writers Write?

Interviewers ask famous writers why they write, and it was the poet John Ashbery who answered, "Because I want to." Flannery O'Connor answered, "Because I'm good at it," and when the occasional interviewer asks me, I quote them both. Then I add that other than writing, I am completely unemployable. But really, secretly, when I'm not being smart-alecky, it's because I want to and I'm good at it.

Anne Lamott

How To Get The Reader's Attention

Show me a villain and I'll show you conflict. Show me conflict and I'll show you a struggle. Show me a struggle, and I'll show you drama. Show me drama, and I'll show you readers paying attention.

William Noble 

William Faulkner on Inspiration to Write

I don't know anything about inspiration, because I don't know what inspiration is--I've heard about it, but I never saw it.

William Faulkner 

In Writing, You Don't Have To Get It Right The First Time

The beautiful part about writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

Robert Cormier 

E. M. Forster On The Literary Critic

[The literary critic's] constant reference to genius is a characteristic of the pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the word exempts him from trying to discover its meaning. Literature is written by geniuses. Novelists are geniuses....Everything [the critic] says may be accurate but all is useless because he is moving round books instead of through them. He either has not read them or cannot read them properly. Books have to be read...it is the only way of discovering what they contain....The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time, to events in the life of its author, or to the events it describes.

E. M. Forster

The Importance of a Novel's Characters

If you can't create characters that are vivid in the reader's imagination, you can't create a good novel. Characters are to a novelist what lumber is to a carpenter and what bricks are to a bricklayer. Characters are the stuff out of which a novel is constructed.

James N. Frey 

Becoming More Than a One-Book Author

Anyone can become a writer. The trick is not in becoming a writer, it is staying a writer. Day after week after month after year. Staying in there for the long haul.

Harlan Ellison 

Sylvia Plath's Despair

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

Sylvia Plath