Uncommon advice; most writers will tell you to do the opposite. But then, they’re most writers and this is Vonnegut.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Kurt Vonnegut
The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
– Erica Jong
From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in the future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
- Ray Bradbury
It is only with imagination and reality that you get to know the thing a novel requires. Reality alone has never been that important to me. A teacher once said that one should write about one’s own back yard; and by this, I suppose, she meant one should write about the things that one knows most intimately. But what is more intimate than one’s own imagination?
Carson McCullers – from The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing
I love the LOTR films. I’ve tried to read the novels several times, but besides getting bogged down by the language, I also get bored. What few lady characters there are exist mainly in the appendices. It’s a shame because Tolkien could write awesome females when he wanted to:
All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But…I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.
— Éowyn, The Two Towers
Dang it, why couldn’t he have created more characters like her? she whined rhetorically.
Peter Jackson was a smart man to expand the roles of Éowyn, Arwen, and Galadriel. These days it’s most often mom who takes the kids to the movies, and if she’s going to give three hours of her life to one, she wants to see the women in it do more than soothe the Alpha male’s weary brow. Though soothing this particular brow definitely has its own appeal.
Procrastination is no limp failure of will; it is an exasperated protest.
Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like—then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.
You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
That’s about as exciting a life as it is for a writer: you write sentences, and you cross out sentences. ~ Paul Auster
Glad it’s not just me.