After three years and 400 pages, I have finally finished writing the first draft of a novel. Now I'm collecting all kinds of advice about writing and editing. Do you have some? I also like books, science fiction, and many other things.
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"Movies are living thing. They evolve. They’re never finished, just abandoned."
David Fincher, talking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Not just movies — novels, too. (via)
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"I think there are three steps to writing a script. First, you have to have a theme, something you want to say. It doesn’t have to be a particularly great thing, but you have to have something that’s bothering you. In the case of Taxi Driver, the theme was loneliness. Then you find a metaphor for that theme, one that expresses it. In Taxi Driver, that was the cabbie, the perfect expression of urban loneliness. Then you have to find a plot, which is the easiest part of the process. All plots have been done; they’re fairly easy, you just work through all the permutations until the plot accurately reflects the theme and the metaphor. You push the theme through the metaphor and you should come out with the plot."
Via Austin Kleon, who adds:
I love that substitution for theme: something that’s bothering you
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
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After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: ”Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.”Annie Dillard (via thebronzemedal)
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So I turned my manuscript into about 130 note cards. My writing process involves spreading them out on the floor and wondering how the heck I’ll ever make sense of them.
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"Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write."
Annie Proulx (via theparisreview)
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"The primary difference between prose and cinema (beyond the obvious) is I think in time, and how each handles it; cinema (like theatre before it) no matter how achingly it might strive for universal generalities, must necessarily show you specific people doing specific things in specific places at very specific times. Prose, on its wily other hand, can say: “Monday morning staff meetings were always a chore for Willy” or “For the next week whenever she went to the coffee shop she saw the woman on the corner” or “And then everybody died.” —The narrow bandwidth of prose can’t begin to approach the wealth of incidental detail that makes up cinematic specificity without enormous slogging effort; most of the tricks and tips one needs to learn to tell stories and have them told with mere words, in fact, those reading protocols we’ve all had put in place, have everything to do with tricking us into thinking that specificity’s been achieved without us noticing (just as a great many of cinema’s tricks are all about forcing us to empathize with the saps up on the screen, bridging the vast gulf between their specifities and ours)."
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"[Newspapers] are the single most efficient way to immerse yourself in the past. If you want to know about 1908, don’t go to some secondary source - read the newspapers. Any old edition will have some revelation which doesn’t hold with our received notions of the time."
Nicholson Baker (via newspaperblackout)
(via newspaperblackout)
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"My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same."
Philip Larkin (via austinkleon)
(via austinkleon)
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"A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning."
Flannery O’Connor (via writingadvice) (via italicsmine)
(via italicsmine)
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"I try to have each book be an antidote to the one before."
Colson Whitehead, interviewed by Harper’s about his upcoming novel Zone One. (via thebronzemedal)
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"It’s not so much writer’s block as writer’s gap …. Meaning, you don’t have anything to say. To which you have only two responses: start writing about anything, and see if something emerges. Or get away from your desk and do something else that will fill you up."
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"Writing…is compromised by doubt. … Writing can be so weighed down by doubt — if not of one’s talent then of paying the rent — that it cannot lift off into a trance. Editing is a different story. By the time we are ready to edit our first draft, we are, in most cases, past the first doubt, and too invested to give up. A fighting spirit defines and facilitates a good edit. We have put in our time, found (more or less) our purpose, and we will not accept defeat. We may sulk after seeing a shoddy draft, but not for long. Life’s demands gratefully interfere with self-pity. Soon enough, we will be editing with a vengeance."
Susan Bell, The Artful Edit
Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani
