26
Jul
Dear Frances:I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories “In Our Time” went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In “This Side of Paradise” I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is “nice” is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the “works.” You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,Your old friend,F. Scott FitzgeraldP.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

Dear Frances:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories “In Our Time” went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In “This Side of Paradise” I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is “nice” is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the “works.” You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,

Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

(via nadianeptura)

16 notes F. Scott Fitzgerald / writing / writing advice / writers / Letters /
24
Jul

In Atoms: “But you have to step out of your element every once in while and try...

inatoms:

“But you have to step out of your element every once in while and try to grow as writer.  It’s how I’ve always gone about it and why you can toss me any topic you’d like and I’ll throw back to you a story.  And that’s writing.”

I drop another sugar cube in my glass and stir as my attention shifts towards a little girl darting thru a flock of seagulls on the beach.  They take off, squealing against the backdrop of the morning tide and I am reminded of wind chimes my mother kept by the battered kitchen window of our 6th floor apartment in New York City and how its sound seemed so Utopian to me then, as if the wind that brushed against its chimes carried with it the illusion of a countryside summer that we simply couldn’t afford to dream of.  

He chugs down his orange juice and forks another piece of French toast into his mouth, talking in between his chews and I listen because it’s all one can ever do, take in everything and fixate on the things that don’t belong in the picture.  ”I suppose one can blame bad poetry for that,” I say, and he shrugs.  

“Writing is a craft.  The more you polish it, the finer the result.”

As with anything, I think, but I remember buffing down my nails to their tender point once and how I couldn’t touch anything for days.  Or how I spun tirelessly for hours trying to perfect my pirouettes until the weight of my efforts snapped my ankle at an impossible angle.  

“I find it unnatural to write that way.”

“Which is why you confine yourself to the conformity of just one theme.  That is what I’m saying.  You need to get out of your shell.”

“Let me ask you… how was your toast?”

He shrugs.  ”It was good.”

“‘It was good.’  And I suppose that if you applied all of your efforts into writing a book on French toast; slapped on it a catchy title, you might very well indeed have a bestseller, but based on what?  When I asked you how was your toast, you could only tell me that is was good, but you couldn’t break down to me its flavour because you haven’t got a clue as to what it’s made of.  If I ask you if you know what a coqui is, you’ll probably tell me it’s a frog and maybe even describe to me its colour, but you couldn’t tell me what it sounds like because you’ve never been to Puerto Rico and surely you’ve done your research and already know it’s the only place you’ll find them.  Well, I can’t write like that.  I need some sort of sense as to what I’m writing.” 

He no longer chews and blood begins to race towards my face to declare my embarrassment for talking to someone who clearly knows more about writing than I do.  And I sit, counting the ticks and the tocks of his wristwatch knowing all too well that I’ve blown it, my only chance to get tutoring from a respectable writer who knows the ropes.

“You ought to write that down somewhere.”

(via inatoms-deactivated20121128)

47 notes inatoms / beautiful prose / writing / writers /
7
Jul
To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction. The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild ephemeral way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise.
—

Vladimir Nabokov - Good Readers and Good Writers (via gwyon)

Love the JSF tag (not mine). I could add to that list, but I won’t lest I become too predictable.
13 notes nabokov / i dedicate this quote to jonathan safran foer and his fans / authors / writing / writers / Vladimir Nabokov /
29
Jun
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
— Carl Sagan (via olanthanide)

(via the-hard-luck-lady)
8,158 notes Books / Writing / writers / Carl Sagan / Sagan /
31
Mar
Everyone is scared inside, not just you. That’s why reading is so good. Keep doing it. Writers are people brave enough to make you feel better about being human because they’re not afraid to reveal their own frailties, weaknesses, desires, failures, and appetites.
— Stephen Fry (via seeyash)

(Source: nzherald.co.nz, via acardiacarrest)
52 notes Stephen Fry / Reading / Writers /
4
Mar

It’s a weird thing, writing.

Sometimes you can look out across what you’re writing, and it’s like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer’s day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you’ll be going on your walk.

And that’s wonderful.

Sometimes it’s like driving through fog. You can’t really see where you’re going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you’re probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you’ll still get where you were going.

And that’s hard while you’re doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn’t exist in that order down on paper, half of what you’d get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.

And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you’re doing and where you’re going, and you couldn’t see or know any of that five minutes before.

And that’s magic.

— There’s more from today’s blog… It’s at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/03/some-thoughts-on-writing-and-driving-in.html (via neil-gaiman)

(via starspray)
2,072 notes neil gaiman / writing / writers /
1
Mar
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through - not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible. … And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
— John Steinbeck on writing (from The Paris Review)

(Source: fortune-n-glory, via schupagirl)
248 notes John Steinbeck / Steinbeck / writing / writing advice / writers /
29
Feb
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvellous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Good Readers and Good Writers (via starspray)

(Source: en.utexas.edu, via starspray)
9 notes Nabokov / Vladimir Nabokov / Good Readers and Good Writers / Writing / Writers / Nature /
28
Feb
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins. It has no job security of any kind, and depends mostly on whether or not you can, like Scheherazade, tell the stories each night that’ll keep you alive until tomorrow. There are undoubtedly hundreds of easier, less stressful, more straightforward jobs in the world. Personally, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do, but that’s me.

If you want to be a writer, write. You may have to get a day job to keep body and soul together (I cheated, and got a writing job, or lots of them, to feed me and pay the rent). If you aren’t going to be a writer, then go and be something else. It’s not a god-given calling. There’s nothing holy or magic about it. It’s a craft that mostly involves a lot of work, most of it spent sitting making stuff up and writing it down, and trying to make what you have made up and written down somehow better. …

It does help, to be a writer, to have the sort of crazed ego that doesn’t allow for failure. The best reaction to a rejection slip is a sort of wild-eyed madness, an evil grin, and sitting yourself in front of the keyboard muttering “Okay, you bastards. Try rejecting this!” and then writing something so unbelievably brilliant that all other writers will disembowel themselves with their pens upon reading it, because there’s nothing left to write. Because the rejection slips will arrive. And, if the books are published, then you can pretty much guarantee that bad reviews will be as well. And you’ll need to learn how to shrug and keep going. Or you stop, and get a real job.
—

Neil Gaiman: On Writing (via fortuneandglory)

Just to encourage myself.

(via greyskylove)

(via stillandalwayswill)
1,409 notes writing / writing advice / writers / neil gaiman / Gaiman /
21
Feb

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.

There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

—

- A bit of writing advice from Neil Gaiman. (via faramirs)

I said it on the Nerdist Podcast, and I believe it. It’s as true for any area of the arts, not just writing. Perhaps it’s true for life.

(via neil-gaiman)

(via mistlemoon)
8,207 notes Gaiman / Neil Gaiman / Writing / writing advice / Writers /