Bad Advice Wednesday: 15 Great Writers’ Writing Advice Revisited
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
25 comments
Baby’s last snapshot.
1. Ernest Hemingway: “Kill your babies. Then kill your grown children, too.”
2. Anton Chekhov: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint on the old lady whispering hush.”
Ralph “Waldo” Emerson
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson: “People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad, and I ought to know.”
4. John Steinbeck: “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Because you’re not.”
5. Alice Munro: “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, but about a Canadian woman with a string of strange boyfriends and an inconclusive ending.”
6. Mark Twain: “Substitute fuck you, you asshole fucking piece of stinking pig-shit every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
7. Sylvia Plath: “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Where’s the oven?”
8. Robert Frost: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. No alcohol in the writer—yeah, right.”
9. Toni Morrison: “Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don’t try to write through it, or force it. Many do, but that won’t work. Just wait, it will come. Everyone knows Domino’s pizza delivery takes forever.”
10. George Orwell: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always it out.”
11. E.L. Doctorow: “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who’s lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?”
12. Henry Miller: “When you can’t create, you can work. When you can’t work, you can masturbate. And then you can do it again.”
Willa Cather
13. Willa Cather: “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. So don’t let any of your characters live past then.”
14: Ayn Rand: “Words are a lens to focus one’s mind on burning ants to death.”
15. E.B. White: “No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude toward those losers is patronizing.”
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[Bill Roorbach’s skin is very dry from gardening but very thick from a roman-candle writing career (how many fiery but colorful balls do you think are left in this mortal tube?). He just noticed that all the subjects in the photos he’s reproduced here are facing to their right, each incrementally more than the last. What do you suppose they are looking at? And what does it say about Bill? For original quotes, Google will do!]
And Bill and Dave… how about you come up with fake quotes to represent EACH OTHER?
How do you know we’re not?
John Steinbeck: “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Because you’re not.”
Ah… he must have had a precognitive flash about me (and many other writers).
I think some of these may be fake!
Guaranteed 100% altered.
Oh, my god! Gasping for air!
My actual favorite is the Alice Munro… As much as I love her!
Couldn’t agree more about Alice, Bill. I think I’m the only fiction writer I know who doesn’t worship at the Altar of Munro.
Blue, I pick blue! (For your next roman candle adventure~) Great fun, I think Sylvia Plath is laughing….Is that too much? Darn that cosmic joke tendency anyway….wicked, positively wicked~ All in good fun.
Sylvia Plath: “Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.”
I knew I liked that gal~ Got me poking around for bell jar’s too, unheard of in Ffld County back in the day. I truly believe in cathartic writing. It makes processing a pleasant event. that gives way quite easily to a nice gin and tonic.
Dang that punctuation beast-no period there. Period. And #14 with a magnifying glass….
I do not believe any of these quotes, Bill. They were all taken our of context. All of these brilliant writers were, at the time of these saddening blatherings, performing in the Catskills and finally trying out comedy. Someone (probably their agents) told them “the money is in the funny”). They had all become comics, at that point (well, not Sylvia Plath so much) but the rest. We all know that writers like these end up in Reno performing night quotes.
Meg, you should be a detective. Or as Virginia Woolf said in her last moments, “Glub, glub, glub, glub.”
Wait, it might have been five “glubs.” Striving to be accurate here at quotation central. Maybe I should post the real quotations…
Look at the run Henry Miller had at the Sands, doing warm up for the Rat Pack. I heard they let him go because of a little matter of stage urination.
I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.
Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
~Flaubert
“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner of Starbucks, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of a tenured professors office. Writing isn’t a support system for tenure. It’s the other way around.”
-Stephen King
And then kill the person at the next table with your laptop. Lotsa blood. Latte everyplace.
It will become a great motion picture.
It’s completely acceptable, if not encouraged, to paint Twain’s wise words on my classroom wall, right? Great!
The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it. Two words: poison candy.
– Autobiography of Mark Twain
I will happily appear at your disciplinary hearing.
Just what I needed this morning.. I’m so grateful to learn that Margaret Wise Brown wisely took Chekhov’s advice.
Flannery O’Connor: The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. Lunch, though, that’s another story.