Steering the Craft

1) “Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete – this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it – can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work. Group criticism is great training for self-criticism. But until quite recently no writer had that training, and yet they learned what they needed. They learned it by doing it.”

2) “The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence – to keep the story going.”

3) “The first chapters of many great novels bring in an amazing amount of material that will be, in one way and another, with variations, repeated throughout the book. The similarity of this incremental repetition of word, phrase, image, and event in prose to recapitulation and development in musical structure is real and deep.”

4) “This isn’t long enough to be an opinion piece, and you must pardon my language, but it needs saying at this time: the adjective or qualifier fucking is a really big tick. People who use it constantly in speaking and electronic messaging may not realize that in writing fiction it’s about as useful as umm.”

5) “You can change point of view, of course; it is your God-given right as an American fiction writer. All I’m saying is, you need to know that you’re doing it.”

6) “A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither. To my mind, plot is merely one way of telling a story, by connecting the happenings tightly, usually through causal chains. Plot is a marvelous device. But it’s not superior to story, and not even necessary to it. As for action, indeed a story must move, something must happen; but the action can be nothing more than a letter sent that doesn’t arrive, a thought unspoken, the passage of a summer day. Unceasing violent action is usually a sign that in fact no story is being told.”

7) “Crowding is what Keats meant when he told poets to ‘load every rift with ore.’ It’s what we mean when we exhort ourselves to avoid flabby language and clichés, never to use ten vague words where two exact words will do, always to seek the vivid phrase, the exact word. By crowding I mean also keeping the story full, always full of what’s happening in it; keeping it moving, not slacking and wandering into irrelevancies; keeping it interconnected with itself, rich with echoes forward and backward. Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings, and implications.
But leaping is just as important. What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice. Listing is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct.”

8) “Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.
Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”