You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there. You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around. (Location 39)
letting the match itself contain and structure the story. (Location 67)
Why choose that one over all other concurrent possibilities? (Location 77)
Ideas are where you find them, (Location 134)
new pieces can shoot up from other pieces, pursuing connections that run through the ground like rhizomes. (Location 137)
If I was blocked by fear, I was also stymied by inexperience. (Location 210)
Despite the approaching deadline I spent half the night slowly sorting, making little stacks of thematically or chronologically associated notes, and arranging them in an order that seemed to hang well from that lead sentence: “The citizen has certain misgivings.” Then, as I do now, I settled on an ending before going back to the beginning. In this instance, I let the comedian himself have the last word: “‘My considered opinion of Nixon versus Kennedy is that neither can win.’” (Location 228)
You would think that by then I would have developed some confidence in writing a new story, but I hadn’t, and never would. (Location 234)
Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you. (Location 235)
To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not. (Location 247)
When I was through studying, separating, defining, and coding the whole body of notes, I had thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with two or three code words representing a component of the story. (Location 254)
Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. (Location 402)
they should not be imposed upon the material. They should arise from within it. (Location 403)
The note-typing could take many weeks, but it collected everything in one legible place, and it ran all the raw material in some concentration through the mind. (Location 411)
If the contents of the seventh folder were before me, the contents of twenty-nine other folders were out of sight. (Location 419)
It is difficult to frame much of a structure until you write a lead. (Location 582)
Hunt through your mind for a good beginning. Then write it. Write a lead. (Location 584)
You might begin with that acceptable and workable lead and then be able to sit back with the lead in hand and think about where you are going and how you plan to get there. (Location 586)
I would go so far as to suggest that you should always write your lead (redoing it and polishing it until you are satisfied that it will serve) before you go at the big pile of raw material and sort it into a structure. (Location 591)
For one thing, the lead is the hardest part of a story to write. (Location 593)
If you are serious about the subject, you might seem to be indicating at the outset that you don’t have confidence in your material so you are trying to make up for it by waxing cute. (Location 595)
The lead—like the title—should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead. (Location 607)
integral beginning that sets a scene and implies the dimensions of the story. (Location 610)
Another way to prime the pump is to write by hand. (Location 612)
Go on scribbling as long as the words develop. Then get up and copy what you have written into your computer file. (Location 616)
“A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” (Location 682)
All the detailed preparations resulted not in a mass of confusing statistics and plans, but in the opposite, paring away the extraneous, reducing and refining until all that was left was what was needed for that game against that team. (Location 702)
Ending pieces is difficult, and usable endings are difficult to come by. It’s nice when they just appear in appropriate places and times. (Location 732)
I always know where I intend to end before I have much begun to write. (Location 734)
Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment. (Location 959)
It is so easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre. You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. (Location 961)
If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels. (Location 962)
Tags: roze
“Though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all.” (Location 973)
“It takes as long as it takes.” (Location 1000)
Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. (Location 1004)
You develop yourself by writing. (Location 1005)
Tags: roze
My advice is, never stop battling for the survival of your own unique stamp. (Location 1010)
Editors are counselors and can do a good deal more for writers in the first-draft stage (Location 1027)
Writers come in two principal categories—those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure—and they can all use help. (Location 1028)
a voice recorder can affect the milieu of an interview. (Location 1116)
Use a voice recorder, but maybe not as a first choice—more like a relief pitcher. (Location 1117)
Whatever you do, don’t rely on memory. (Location 1118)
As you scribble away, the interviewee is, of course, watching you. Now, unaccountably, you slow down, and even stop writing, while the interviewee goes on talking. The interviewee becomes nervous, tries harder, and spills out the secrets of a secret life, or maybe just a clearer and more quotable version of what was said before. Conversely, if the interviewee is saying nothing of interest, you can pretend to be writing, just to keep the enterprise moving forward. (Location 1122)
You can develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit. (Location 1126)
If you don’t seem to get something, the subject will probably help you get it. (Location 1128)
Writing is selection. (Location 1200)
When you are making notes you are forever selecting. I left out more than I put down. (Location 1201)
I think you should do enough preparation to be polite. (Location 1202)
do as much reading as the situation impels you to do. (Location 1203)
Nonetheless, you get it wrong, (Location 1205)
the writer has responsibility to be fair to the subject, who trustingly and perhaps unwittingly delivers words and story into the writer’s control. (Location 1217)
Once captured, words have to be dealt with. (Location 1234)
Writing has to be fun at least once in a pale blue moon. (Location 1448)
The last thing I would ever suggest to young writers is that they consciously try to write for the ages. (Location 1476)
If you look for allusions and images that have some durability, your choices will stabilize your piece of writing. (Location 1478)
You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness. (Location 1487)
Frames of reference are grossly abused by writers and broadcasters of the punch-line school. (Location 1527)
I beg you to keep it as it is for that one reader.” (Location 1585)
“Dear Joel: You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.” (Location 1953)
If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer. (Location 1960)
First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. (Location 1970)
That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. (Location 1972)
The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. (Location 1979)
the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. (Location 1980)
you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. (Location 1986)
the essence of the process is revision. (Location 1989)
practice taking shots at it. (Location 2012)
Then I went back to my own writing, my own inability to get going until five in the afternoon, my animal sense of being hunted, my resemblance to the sand of Gibraltar. (Location 2015)
After reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose words and phrases in pencilled boxes for Draft No. 4. (Location 2019)
I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. (Location 2021)
You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity. (Location 2025)
thesauruses are useful things, but they don’t talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. (Location 2043)
The value of a thesaurus is in the assistance it can give you in finding the best possible word for the mission that the word is supposed to fulfill. (Location 2045)
Your destination is the dictionary. (Location 2047)
if you are introducing something, introduce it. Don’t get artistic with the definite article. (Location 2118)
achieve an intent in the clearest possible way. (Location 2125)
Words are too easy to play on. (Location 2216)
Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. (Location 2257)
At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. (Location 2259)
Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material—that much and no more. (Location 2261)
I jot down everything that strikes me as having any potentiality whatever to be useful in the future composition, and since I am learning on the job and don’t know what the piece will be like, I scoop up, say, ten times as much stuff as I’ll ultimately use. (Location 2285)
“Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.” (Location 2305)
To cause a reader to see in her mind’s eye an entire autumnal landscape, for example, a writer needs to deliver only a few words and images—such as corn shocks, pheasants, and an early frost. The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. (Location 2313)
Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have. (Location 2324)
greening was a craft in itself—studying your completed and approved product, your “finished” piece, to see what could be left out. (Location 2338)
The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed. (Location 2344)
