Let’s resolve a headache, the one that has plagued writers since…well, the plague. It is: when to use “affect” versus “effect.” Read More...
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Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.
A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.
When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.


























