For a while I wrote down everything useful or interesting that writers I liked wrote about writing and storytelling. These are a few of the quotations.
Sunday 14 May: I did a certain amount of writing yesterday,
but was hindered by two things: the need to clear up the study (which had got
into the chaos that always indicates the literary or philological
preoccupation) and attend to business; and trouble with the moon. By which I mean that I found my moons in the
crucial days between Frodo’s flight and present situation…were doing impossible
things, rising in one part of the country and setting simultaneously in
another. Rewriting bits of back chapters
took all afternoon.
--J.R.R. Tolkien, From Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 202
The only thing worth writing about is people. I’ll say that again. The only thing worth writing about it
people. People. Human beings.
Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight
by insight. If you do not do it, the
story is a failure. It may be the most
innovative scientific idea ever promulgated, but it will be a failure. I cannot stress this enough. There is no nobler chore in the universe than
holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and
different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the ‘normal,’ the
obvious. People are reflected in the
glass. The fantasy situation into which
you thrust them is the mirror itself.
And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the
world around us. Failing that, you have
failed totally.
--Harlan Ellison, “Telltale Tics and Tremors”
There is no technique that can be discovered and applied to
make it possible for one to write. If you go to a school where there are
classes in writing, these classes should not be to teach you how to write, but
to teach you the limits and possibilities of words and the respect due them.
One thing that is always with the writer—no matter how long he has written or
how good he is—is the continuing process of learning how to write. As soon as
the writer ‘learns to write,’ as soon as he knows what he is going to find, and
discovers a way to say what he knew all along, or worse still, a way to say
nothing, he is finished. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its
source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass
and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his
reader…The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that
doesn’t require his attention. We hear a
great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to
the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out
and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has
survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest
of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you
probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot. The writer’s business is to
contemplate the experience, not to be merged in it. Everywhere I go I’m asked
if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t
stifle enough of them.
--Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Art of Fiction”
--Neil Gaiman, Smoke and
Mirrors, 12
In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only
mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been
about.
--Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, X
If any artist tells you “I am a camera’ or ‘I am a mirror,’
distrust him instantly, he’s fooling you, pulling a fast one. Artists are
people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in truth. You get the
facts from outside. The truth you get from inside.
--Ursula K. LeGuin, “Talking About Writing”
