"Dry" Writing

We sometimes speak of academic writing, of courtroom transcripts, of material that does not compel our attention or elicit a strong desire to continue reading as dry. What we mean by "dry" is that it does not enable use to see what we read, it does not move us, and, most important, it does not stimulate our intellect with insight, its ostensible purpose.

Sol Stein 

Is The Ability to Write Well a "Gift"?

Writing is at the very least a knack, like drawing or being facile on the piano. Because everybody can speak and form letters, we mistakenly suppose that good, plain, writing is within everybody's power. Would we say this of good, straightforward, accurate drawing? Would we say this melodic sense and correct, fluent harmonizing at the keyboard? Surely not. We say these are "gifts." Well, so is writing, even if the writing is of a bread-and-butter note.

Jacques Barzun 

The Non-Writing Writer

The trail of literary history is littered with those writers who fell along the way because the anxiety of trying to write paralyzed their hand. Many non-writing writers are gifted. The best writers I know teach school and sell real estate. Some still plan to write "someday." Others have given up altogether. Their block lies not with their ability or skill but with their nerve.

Ralph Keyes 

Selecting a Genre

  You want to write, but to write about what, exactly? A memoir; history; poetry; a novel? Or a short story, perhaps. Or a long short story.

     While they are theoretically allowed to exercise their free will, many writers will contend that they've been invisibly but firmly propelled in one particular direction. Writers might write what they like to read, and we have heard how reading is the foundation of writing. Following your own reading tastes might help you narrow the field; fiction or nonfiction; poetry or prose. If you love movies, or the theater, or TV, you may be driven to write in those genres.

Ian Jackman

Dystopian Science Fiction

Dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre's inception, but the past decade has observed an unprecedented rise in its authorship. Once a literary niche within a niche, mankind is now destroyed with clockwork regularity by nuclear weapons, computers gone rogue, nanotechnology, and man-made viruses…We have plagues and we have zombies and we have zombie plagues.

Michael Solana

Writers Need Confidence to Create Great Fiction

To reach the highest levels of the craft, above all you'll need confidence. Unshakable confidence to leap forcefully into the realm of creation.

Noah Lukeman 

Erotica as a Literary Genre

One could argue that erotica is either a subgenre of "romance" or a separate literary category. Many romance authors sneak raw sex into their books without calling them "erotica" to avoid limiting the market for their titles.

Elaine Sciolino 

Literature's Prize-Winning Drunks

William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are probably three of the most notorious falling-down drunks in the literary history of twentieth century America. There were followed by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Cheever, whose drinking habits became well-known components of their literary lives.

Jim Fisher 

For Purposes of Fiction, What is Plot?

An idea is not a story. A first draft is not a story. A moral is not a story. A character is not a story. A theme is not a story. A plot--now, that's a story! So where do I get me one? You might ask. At your writing desk. Because plots don't exist. They can't be shopped for or ordered on-line. They are coaxed into being. They develop. They grow in the course of the writing.

John Dufrsne 

Exclamation Points in Literary Dialogue

Exclamation points in dialogue tend to make statements sound like lovesick teenage email. Try at all costs to avoid using them!

Allison Amend

Overdone Novelistic Settings

Descriptions of the setting are easily overdone, often clumsy. Through a misplaced sense of obligation to describe a setting exhaustively, many young writers get into what I call the setting fallacy--that is, they start the story with a whole paragraph describing the sky, weather, or a city street as the protagonist walks into a bar.

David Madden

Movies About Writers

Writers like watching movies about themselves. It gives us something to do. My doctor father used to scoff at movies about doctors because he was always finding fault with some diagnosis or treatment. I don't know how cops or lawyers feel about their portrayals. Politicians are usually shown as corruptible. Teachers as sad. Writers are variously crazy (Jack Nicholson in "The Shining"), reckless (Michael Douglas in "Wonder Boys"), cranky (Van Johnson in "23 Paces to Baker Street"), self-destructive (Ray Milland in "The Lost Weekend"), without principle (William Holden in "Sunset Boulevard") and/or flailing (Paul Giamatti in "Sideways"). Nothing to argue with, really.

     What we are not shown doing in movies is writing. Composers are shown composing because we can listen to their flights of fancy on the soundtrack. Painters are shown painting because one can actually see art in progress. Kirk Douglas did some very good van Gogh impressions. Ed Harris went so hog wild in "Pollock," one was tempted to go out and buy an original Harris. But writers are rarely shown laboring at the craft....I suppose there's nothing visually dramatic in what we do, though we can get quite worked up about crumpling little balls of paper, tossing them on the floor, then turning our heads this way and sometimes that.

Roger Rosenblatt   

Should Writers Be Critics As Well?

Every time a writer tells the truth about a manuscript (or book), to a friend-author, he loses that friend, or sees that friendship dim and fade away to a ghost of what it was formerly. Every time a writer tells the truth about a manuscript (or book), to a stranger-author, he makes an enemy. If the writer loves his friend and fears to lose him, he lies to his friend. But what's the good of straining himself to lie to a stranger? And, with like insistence, what's the good of making enemies anyway?

Jack London

The Pressure of Following Up a Successful First Novel

No one is waiting for you to write your first novel. No one cares if you finish it. But after your first, if it goes well, everyone seems to be waiting. You go from having nothing to lose to having everything to lose, and that's what creates the panic.

Jeffrey Eugenides 

How Many Writers Are Mentally Unhinged?

Unsurprisingly, a psychological survey of the Iowa Workshop showed that 80 percent of writers in the program reported evidence of manic depression, alcoholism, or other lonely additions in themselves or their immediate families. We're writers. Who ever claimed we were a tightly wrapped bunch?

Tom Grimes

The Effect of M.F.A. Writers' Workshops on American Literature

Less than a lifetime ago, reputable American writers would occasionally start fistfights, sleep in ditches and even espouse communist doctrines. Such were the prerogatives and exigencies of the artist's existence, until M.F.A. [Masters of Fine Arts] programs arrived to impose discipline and provide livelihoods. Whether the professionalization of creative writing has been good for American literature has set off a lot of elegantly worded and soul-searching and well-mannered debate.

Timothy Aubry 

Successful Novelists Ignored by the Manhattan Literary World

Isaac Asimov complained that none of his books were ever reviewed in The New Yorker, even though, as a well-known writer, he had been mentioned in the magazine many times. The reason: he was not taken seriously as a novelist because most of his writing was science fiction. Wallace Stegner, a brilliant novelist and nonfiction writer who lived in and wrote about the American West, was never reviewed in the New York Times even though his novels, Angle of Repose (1971) and Spectator Bird (l976), won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award respectively. Why did the Times ignore Wallace Stegner? He was not part of the Manhattan literary scene.

Jim Fisher 

Cliche`s in Pulp Fiction

The really popular books are full of cliche`s, people "flushing with anger" or "going pale with fear." Popular authors bring nothing new to their readers, and I have no wish to belong to that type of popular writer.

Graham Greene

The Essence of Science Fiction

 Science fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effects of technological change in an imaged future, an alternative present or re-conceived history…

     Science fiction, at the center, holds that the encroachment of technological or social change will make the future different and that it will feel different to those within it. In a technologically altered culture, people will regard themselves and their lives in ways that we cannot apprehend. That is the base of the science fiction vision, but the more important part comes as corollary: the effects of a changed technology upon us will be more profound than change brought about by psychological or social pressure... It will be these changes--those imposed extrinsically by force--which really matter; that is what the science fiction writer is saying, and in their inevitability and power they trivialize the close psychological interactions in which most of us transact our lives.

Barry N. Malzberg  

What is "Literary Fiction"?

     "Genre fiction" is a nasty phrase--when did genre turn into an adjective? But I object to the term for a different reason. It was clever marketing by publishers to set certain contemporary fiction apart and declare it Literature--and therefore important art and somehow better than genre writing.

     The term sneaks back into the past in an anachronistic way, so that, for example, Jane Austen's works are described as literary fiction. This is nonsense. Can anyone think for a moment that were she writing today she'd be published as literary fiction? No, and not because she'd end up under romance, but because she writes comedy, and literary fiction, with rare exception, does not include comedy. [Literary novels are humorless. Perhaps that's why they call it "serious fiction."]

     Jane Austen never for a moment imagined she was writing literature. Posterity decided that, not her. She wrote fiction to entertain and to make money which is what we novelists have been doing ever since. Perhaps in our serious and solemn way, we ask fiction to bear a burden it was never intended to carry.

Elizabeth Edmondson

A Writer Can Lose Confidence in His Work

I've been working, working, working, and you know, sometimes you look back at your work and you see that it just isn't any good.

Truman Capote

The Old Writer

Old writers in their youth understood themselves to be apprentices to masters superior in seasoned experience, and were ready to wait their turn in the hierarchy of recognition. In their lone and hardened way of sticking-to-it, they were unwaveringly industrious…In their college years, they might on occasion enroll in courses in "creative writing," though unaware of the vapid redundancy of the phrase: courses presided over by defeated professors who had once actually published a novel and were thereby rendered reverential, but afterward were never heard from again. Old writers were spared…the institutionalization of creative writing M.F.A. [Masters of Fine Arts] programs in the universities, taught by graduates of M.F.A. programs--a cycle of M.F.A. students who will in turn become M.F.A. teachers…Old writers in their youth were resolutely immured in their first novels, steadfastly enduring unworldly and self-chosen isolation; they shunned journalism, they shunned coteries, they shunned parties, they shunned the haunting of magazines for review assignments, they shunned editorial work, fearful of being drawn into the distracting pragmatism of publishing.

Cynthia Ozick 

Isaac Asimov's Writing Habits

My only ritual is to sit close enough to the typewriter so that my fingers touch the keys.

Isaac Asimov

For the Novelist There is Only One Plot

As far as I'm concerned, in the abstract there's only one plot, and it goes like this: A person or group or entity wants something. Another person or group or entity throws up every barrier imaginable to stop that goal from being achieved.

David Morrell 

Isaac Asimov On Humor

Humor is difficult. Other kinds of stories don't have to hit the bull's-eye. The outer rings have their rewards too. A story can be fairly suspenseful, moderately romantic, somewhat terrifying, and so on. This is not the case with humor. A story is either funny or it is not funny. Nothing in between. The humor target contains only a bull's-eye.

Isaac Asimov

The Power of the Political Novel

The line between fiction and nonfiction is more blurry than many people like to admit. Sometimes, political writing that claims to be nonfiction is actually fiction. The political power of such fiction-as-nonfiction is undeniable…

     Most novels aren't directly credited with starting wars, Yet fiction still instigates change. Fiction can say publicly what might otherwise appear unsayable, combating the coerced silence that is a favored weapon of those who have power.

Mohsin Hamid

Are Extremely Creative Writers Mentally Unbalanced?

The writer possess a reality of a different order than that of the ordinary man. His ego is entirely identified with his creative processes which for him constitutes the entire meaning and purpose of his life. He is known to be emotionally unstable, neurotic, and often appears mentally unbalanced or even psychotic. Genius and madness have from time immemorial been associated, and the lives of the creative artists and geniuses in all fields do reveal an overwhelming preponderance for erratic conduct, emotional stress and irrational reactions with definite psychic disturbances manifested in conflict, struggle and mental disorder.

Dr. Beatrice Hinkle 

The Schlemiel Story

The schlemiel story is a genre I always thought I'd avoid if I were an editor, for it has seemed to me that stories about losers, twerps, dullards, and schnooks would be of interest only to an audience of losers, twerps, dullards, and schnooks, at best, and no such people would be reading anything I edited.

Robert Silverberg

John Steinbeck on Hemingway's Suicide

The first time we heard of Ernest Hemingway's death [1958] was a call from the London Daily Mail. I found it shocking. He had only one theme--only one. A man contends with the forces of the world, called fate, and meets them with courage. Surely a man has a right to remove his own life but you'll find no such possibility in any of Hemingway's heroes. The sad thing is that I think he would have hated accident much more than suicide. He was an incredibly vain man.

John Steinbeck 

Academic Writing, A Blight on Literature

A friend of mine turned in a paper to a college course on behavior modification. She had tried to express in simple English some of her reservations about this increasingly popular approach to education. She received the paper back with the comment: "Please rewrite this in behavioral terms." It is little wonder that human beings have so much trouble saying what they feel, when they are told that there is a specialized vocabulary for saying what they think. The language of simplicity and spontaneity is forced to retreat behind the barricades of an official prose developed by a few experts who believe that jargon is the most precise means of communication.

Lawrence Langer 

Defending the Romance Novel

 The detractors of romance novels--usually people who haven't read any--often say the stories are simplistic and childish, and they contain no big words and very little plot--just a bunch of sex scenes separated by filler and fluff. A common view of romance is that there's only one story; all the authors do is change the characters' names and hair color and crank out another book.

     Critics of romance also accuse the stories--and their authors by extension--of presenting a world in which women are helpless. Romance, they say, encourages young readers to fantasize about Prince Charming riding to their rescue, to think their only important goal is to find a man to take care of them. The books are accused of limiting women by idealizing romantic relationships, making women unable to relate to real men because they're holding out for a wonderful Harlequin hero.

     In fact, rather than trailing behind the times, romance novels have actually been on the cutting edge of society. Long before divorce was common, for instance, romance novels explored the circumstances in which it might be better to dissolve a marriage than to continue it…

     Even early romances often featured working women and emphasized the importance of economic independence for women. While some heroines are indeed young, inexperienced, and in need of assistance, the usual romance heroine is perfectly competent. Finding her ideal man isn't a necessity; it's a bonus.

     Modern romance novels tell a young woman that she can be successful, useful, and valuable on her own; that there are men who will respect her and treat her well; and that such men are worth waiting for.

Leigh Michaels, On Writing Romance, 2007 

Overcoming Literary Rejection

I was trying to get my work published, first with poetry, then with articles and stories. But they got nowhere at all. There was a steady flow of rejection slips. Once in awhile, a handwritten word, "Sorry, thanks, try us again." The stories, two-hundred and fifty of them a week, were, with one exception, amazingly bad. But I thought, these people have made this effort. You can really only judge a writer by his best work. Maybe these are all just lapses. I wrote, "Sorry, try us again," on all of them. I had to stop writing the notes.

Louis L'Amour 

Cutting The Fat Out Of A Manuscript

I suffer agony over some of the cutting, but I realize it's got to be done. When something really good goes it's an awful wrench, but as you probably know, something really can be good and yet have no place in the scheme of a book.

Thomas Wolfe