As shown in Advice From One Writer to Another (part one), professional writers have a great deal to say about the writing process. Like the rest of us, they find writing to be frustrating at times--and enjoyable, maddening, comforting, and rewarding at other times.
Here then is more free advice--from one writer to another.
- "Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."
(Gloria Steinem)
- "Read, read, read. Read everything--trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."
(William Faulkner) - "An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself."
(Irwin Shaw) - "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof b.s. detector. This is the writer's radar and all good writers have it."
(Ernest Hemingway) - "I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath."
(Lynn Abbey) - "Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to."
(William Somerset Maugham)
- "The waste basket is the writer's best friend."
(Isaac Bashevis Singer) - "Don't get it right, just get it written."
(James Thurber) - "Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon."
(H. L. Mencken) - "Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
(Samuel Johnson) - "Get in, get out. Don't linger."
(Raymond Carver) - "I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter."
(James Michener) - "If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you."
(Dorothy Parker) - "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."
(Scott Adams) - "Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
(Ezra Pound) - "You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel."
(Tim Cahill) - "Every writer I know has trouble writing."
(Joseph Heller) - "The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."
(William Saroyan) - "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about."
(Benjamin Franklin) - "The writer's duty is to keep on writing."
(William Styron) - "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."
(Joan Didion) - "Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice."
(Barbara Tuchman)
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