a book bit me and i liked it

Hi there 🖐️

I lied because I’m always certain about my structural decisions, and always wrong.

You don’t need to write what you (already) know, because with research and hard work and pure will and a willingness to blunder and bomb as you write, you can make yourself know a great deal.

Write for love and revenge, to change your life and the lives of others.

To do anything, and enjoy it and improve, you have to have the stomach—the heart—for failure. This is painful. I’m awful at it. A flop. Better not quit.

Your voice is merely the idiosyncratic linguistic habits, good and bad, that give you pleasure. Your own little indulgences, the way you form your thoughts, whether you like to repeat words or let your sentences go long or are careless, inconsistent with your commas. Voice comes from writing with an open ear and open mind. It rises up from the page. It doesn’t descend from the ether.

Present tense is easier to write than past tense, but an interesting present tense is much harder.

In good present-tense fiction, memory and possibility pass their shadows over the characters no matter what. Without that, the present tense is a stretch of road through the desert in a cartoon, the odd cactus passing behind a car. The road itself is exactly the same.

No fiction is universal, thank God. Nothing is blander than universality.

We are all dogs. What works for an Australian shepherd would kill a corgi. A greyhound needs different discipline than a clumber spaniel, though they both have work to do. You have to figure out what will make you heel, sit, stay, be it other people or running out the clock on the day’s distraction.

If you call yourself a writer, whether you’ve written that day or month or year, you go into the world as a writer.

Don’t be afraid to romanticize your process, as long as by romanticize you mean make loveable. This only goes for good habits. If you romanticize your bad habits and deficiencies—a too-common thing for writers!—you will grow to love them, and you’ll be perfectly happy never writing a thing.

Ambition in fiction is merely the willingness to make mistakes.

I have never encountered a rule for fiction I believed in, at least in the long run, apart from Don’t use a gothic font to make your work feel spooky.

A first line needn’t be ornate or long. It needn’t grab you by the lapels and give what for. A first line is only a demand for further attention, an invitation to the rest of the book.

When a short story falls—when people read your work and are confounded—it’s because the story is breaking rules it has set up for itself. Time moves in a way we haven’t been taught to follow. Characters act inconsistently, or like cliches, following patterns of human behavior from outside the story: movies or television or bad fiction or received knowledge. The level of reality fluctuates for no reason. The story hasn’t taught you how to read it.

Thank God I’m invisible when I write, body and mind, entirely alone and wallowing at my desk.