Q: What do you think is magical about fiction?DFW: ... The first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking or w...
If you're going to have a complicated story, you must work to a map; otherwise you can never make a map of it afterwards.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay
One expert may be as good as another until one writes a book
When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.
Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.
Build your novel one word at a time. Remember that minutes = novels.
Only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.
If you only had a year left to live, what book would you write?Now, write that book.
Originality is not writing the story that has never been told, but writing the stories only you can tell.
All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.
Honesty makes stories real and characters memorable. From there, taking them to where they need to go will be all the development they need.
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.
Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what th...
On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.
You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.
Writing is an adventure. There is no way to know where it will take you, and what you will find. You could find success. You could find fans. Or, best of all, you could find yourself.
it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it