Miscellaneous Advice to Writers

There are no rules here.  We're just trying to accomplish something.

                                                    -- Thomas Edison

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.

                                                   -- Emile Chartier

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

                                                    -- Albert Einstein

If you keep working, inspiration comes.

                                                    -- Alexander Calder

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

                                                    -- Willa Cather

I hear and I forget.  I see and I remember.  I do and I understand.

                                                    -- Confucius

Exuberance is beauty.

                                                    -- William Blake

Reality is what you can get away with.

                                                   -- Robert Anton Wilson

Figure out the questions the reader will ask.  Ask them.

                                                    -- Donald Murray

There are three rules for writing a novel.  Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.

                                                    -- W. Somerset Maugham

We are all guilty of the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What those powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring.

                                                    -- Henry Miller

I will be so brief I have already finished.

                                                    -- Salvador Dali, in the world's shortest

                                                    recorded speech

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof bullshit detector.

                                                    -- Ernest Hemingway

What makes me happy is rewriting.  In the first draft you get your ideas and your theme clear, if you are using some kind of metaphor you get that established, and certainly you have to know where you're coming out.  But the next time through it's like cleaning house, getting rid of all the junk, getting things in the right order, tightening things up.

                                                    -- Ellen Goodman

Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story: first, he said, throw out the first three pages.

                                                   -- Ursula K. Le Guin

Reading and writing comprise a series of transactions between reader and writer, reality and language, prior texts and this text, the individual and the context.

                                                    -- Linda L. Berger

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

                                                    -- Mark Twain

A good judge of the facts has declared: ‘All writing is rewriting.’ He meant good writing, for easy reading. The path to rewriting is obvious: when rereading after a shorter or longer lapse of time what one has written, one feels dissatisfaction with this or that word, sentence, paragraph—or possibly with the whole effort, the essay or chapter. If, as I shall assume, things are not totally bad, the rewriting affects only bits here and there. The criterion is as it has been throughout: Meaning. If words you have set down puzzle you once you have forgotten how they came to your mind, they will puzzle the stranger and you must do something about them—rediscover your meaning and express it, not some other or none at all.

                                                    -- Jacques Barzun

There are no second-rate genres, only second-rate practitioners.

                                                    -- Joyce Carol Oates

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

                                                    -- Philip K. Dick

Anything you'd like to add to these?  Send it to me here.