The Daily Routines of Famous Writers

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a
word on paper.

Kurt Vonneguts recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved
writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews
many from the fantastic Paris Review archives and culled a handful of writing routines
from some of my favorite authors. Enjoy.

Ray Bradbury, a lifelong proponent of working with joy and an avid champion of public
libraries, playfully defies the question of routines in this 2010 interview:

My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me
there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is
always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I dont schedule it. It says: Get to the
typewriter right now and finish this.
[]
I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up with
my parents and my brother in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in
the living room, with the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same
time. Later on, when I wanted to write Fahrenheit 451, I went up to UCLA and found a
basement typing room where, if you inserted ten cents into the typewriter, you could buy
thirty minutes of typing time.

Joan Didion creates for herself a kind of incubation period for ideas, articulated in this
1968 interview:

I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what Ive done that day. I
cant do it late in the afternoon because Im too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It
removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other
things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following
these evening notes. When Im really working I dont like to go out or have anybody to
dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I dont have the hour, and start the next day with
just some bad pages and nowhere to go, Im in low spirits. Another thing I need to do,
when Im near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. Thats one reason I
go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesnt leave you when
youre asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get
up and start typing.

E. B. White, in the same fantastic interview that gave us his timeless insight on the role
and responsibility of the writer, notes his relationship with sound and ends on a note
echoing Tchaikovsky on work ethic:
I never listen to music when Im working. I havent that kind of attentiveness, and I
wouldnt like it at all. On the other hand, Im able to work fairly well among ordinary
distractions. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it
is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. Theres a
lot of traffic. But its a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in,
despite the carnival that is going on all around me. A girl pushing a carpet sweeper under
my typewriter table has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken my mind off my
work, unless the girl was unusually pretty or unusually clumsy. My wife, thank God, has
never been protective of me, as, I am told, the wives of some writers are. In consequence,
the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man
they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go.
A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a
word on paper.

Photograph by Tom Palumbo, 1956

Jack Kerouac describes his rituals and superstitions in 1968:

I had a ritual once of lighting a candle and writing by its light and blowing it out when I
was done for the night also kneeling and praying before starting (I got that from a
French movie about George Frideric Handel) but now I simply hate to write. My
superstition? Im beginning to suspect the full moon. Also Im hung up on the number
nine though Im told a Piscean like myself should stick to number seven; but I try to do
nine touchdowns a day, that is, I stand on my head in the bathroom, on a slipper, and
touch the floor nine times with my toe tips, while balanced. This is incidentally more than
yoga, its an athletic feat, I mean imagine calling me unbalanced after that. Frankly I do
feel that my mind is going. So another ritual as you call it, is to pray to Jesus to preserve
my sanity and my energy so I can help my family: that being my paralyzed mother, and
my wife, and the ever-present kitties. Okay?
He then adds a few thought on the best time and place for writing:
The desk in the room, near the bed, with a good light, midnight till dawn, a drink when
you get tired, preferably at home, but if you have no home, make a home out of your
hotel room or motel room or pad: peace.

Susan Sontag resolves in her diary in 1977, adding to her collected wisdom on writing:
Starting tomorrow if not today:
I will get up every morning no later than eight. (Can break this rule once a week.)
I will have lunch only with Roger [Straus]. (No, I dont go out for lunch. Can break this
rule once every two weeks.)
I will write in the Notebook every day. (Model: Lichtenbergs Waste Books.)
I will tell people not to call in the morning, or not answer the phone.
I will try to confine my reading to the evening. (I read too much as an escape from
writing.)
I will answer letters once a week. (Friday? I have to go to the hospital anyway.)
Then, in a Paris Review interview nearly two decades later, she details her routine:

I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes a pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that
fetish of American writers. I like the slowness of writing by hand. Then I type it up and
scrawl all over that. And keep on retyping it, each time making corrections both by hand
and directly on the typewriter, until I dont see how to make it any better. Up to five years
ago, that was it. Since then there is a computer in my life. After the second or third draft it
goes into the computer, so I dont retype the whole manuscript anymore, but continue to
revise by hand on a succession of hard-copy drafts from the computer.
[]
I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough
confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once
something is really under way, I dont want to do anything else. I dont go out, much of
the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. Its a very undisciplined way of working and
makes me not very prolific. But Im too interested in many other things.

In 1932, under a section titled Daily Routine, Henry Miller footnotes his 11
commandments of writing with this wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and
mental health:
MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.
If in fine fettle, write.
AFTERNOONS:

Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no

diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.
EVENINGS:
See friends. Read in cafs.
Explore unfamiliar sections on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.
Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.
Paint if empty or tired.
Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.
Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an
occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafs and trains and streets. Cut
the movies! Library for references once a week.

In this 1965 interview, Simone de Beauvoir contributes to dispelling the torturedgenius myth of writing:

Im always in a hurry to get going, though in general I dislike starting the day. I first have
tea and then, at about ten oclock, I get under way and work until one. Then I see my
friends and after that, at five oclock, I go back to work and continue until nine. I have no
difficulty in picking up the thread in the afternoon. When you leave, Ill read the paper or
perhaps go shopping. Most often its a pleasure to work.
[]
If the work is going well, I spend a quarter or half an hour reading what I wrote the day
before, and I make a few corrections. Then I continue from there. In order to pick up the
thread I have to read what Ive done.

Ernest Hemingway, who famously wrote standing (Hemingway stands when he writes.
He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kuduthe

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typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.), approaches his craft with
equal parts poeticism and pragmatism:
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as
possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work
and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when
you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come
to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop
and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in
the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you
are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love
to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything
until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get
through.

Don DeLillo tells The Paris Review in 1993:

I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running.
This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle its a nice
kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back into
book time, which is transparent you dont know its passing. No snack food or coffee.
No cigarettes I stopped smoking a long time ago. The space is clear, the house is quiet.
A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to
squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break
the spell I look at a photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer
Colm Tn. The face of Borges against a dark background Borges fierce, blind, his
nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks
painted; hes like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely
rapture. Ive read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I dont know
anything about the way he worked but the photograph shows us a writer who did not

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waste time at the window or anywhere else. So Ive tried to make him my guide out of
lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.

Productivity maniac Benjamin Franklin had a formidably rigorous daily routine:

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Image by Nick Bilton

Haruki Murakami shares the mind-body connection noted by some of historys famous
creators:
When Im in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours.
In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and
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listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without
variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; its a form of mesmerism. I
mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

William Gibson tells the Paris Review in 2011:

When Im writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions,
as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am
back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is
happening, Ill give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down
and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some
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more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that
state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
[]
As I move through the book it becomes more demanding. At the beginning, I have a fiveday workweek, and each day is roughly ten to five, with a break for lunch and a nap. At
the very end, its a seven-day week, and it could be a twelve-hour day.
Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemically
altered state that will go away if I dont continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is
simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleeping becomes problematic.
Im always glad to see the back of that.

Maya Angelou shares her day with Paris Review in 1990:

I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because
writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go
out and shop Im a serious cook and pretend to be normal. I play sane Good
morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I
have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the
dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if Ive
done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. Thats the cruelest time
you know, to really admit that it doesnt work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe

15

fifty pages and read them fifty acceptable pages its not too bad. Ive had the same
editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would
you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him
things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very
much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a
telegram that says, OK, so youre right. So what? Dont ever mention this to me again. If
you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his
wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of
about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the
years. From the other end of the table he said, And Ive kept every one! Brute! But the
editing, ones own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.

Anas Nin simply notes, in a 1941 parenthetical comment, in the third volume of her
diaries:
I write my stories in the morning, my diary at night.
She then adds in the fifth volume, in 1948.

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I write every day. I do my best work in the morning.

Lastly, the Kurt Vonnegut routine that inspired this omnibus, recorded in a letter to his
wife in 1965:
In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit
themselves, without consulting me. Im just as glad they havent consulted me about the
tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat
breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the
nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour,
return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork,
either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging
intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the
only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen
to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and situps all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not. Last
night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of
Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it
was heart-breaking. Thats all right. I like to have my heart broken.

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Jack Kerouacs List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for

Prose and Life
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge.

In the year of reading more and writing better, weve absorbed David Ogilvys 10 nobullshit tips, Henry Millers 11 commandments, John Steinbecks 6 pointers, and
various invaluable advice from other great writers. Now comes Jack Kerouac cultural
icon, symbolism sage, exquisite idealist with his 30-point list, entitled Belief and
Technique for Modern Prose. With items like No fear or shame in the dignity of yr
experience, language & knowledge and Accept loss forever, the list is as much a
blueprint for writing as it is a meditation on life.
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

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26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. Youre a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
The list was allegedly tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsbergs hotel room in North Beach
a year before his iconic poem Howl was written which is of little surprise, given
Ginsberg readily admitted Kerouacs influence and even noted in the dedication of Howl
and Other Poems that he took the title from Kerouac.
As Charles Eames might say, to be realistic one must always admit the influence of
those who have gone before.

10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints.

How is your new years resolution to read more and write better holding up? After tracing
the fascinating story of the most influential writing style guide of all time and absorbing
advice on writing from some of modern historys most legendary writers, here comes
some priceless and pricelessly uncompromising wisdom from a very different kind of
cultural legend: iconic businessman and original Mad Man David Ogilvy. On
September 7th, 1982, Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees,
titled How to Write and found in the 1986 gem The Unpublished David Ogilvy (public
library):
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write
well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:
1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

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4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally,

judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next
morning and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you
want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, dont write. Go and tell the guy what you want.
David
This, and much more of Ogilvys timeless advice, can be found in The Unpublished
David Ogilvy, a fine addition to this ongoing archive of notable wisdom on writing. The
book is long out of print, but you can still find a used copy by rummaging through
Amazons stock or the library stacks.

Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck

On the value of unconscious association, or why the best advice is no advice.

If this is indeed the year of reading more and writing better, weve been right on course
with David Ogilvys 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Millers 11 commandments, and various
invaluable advice from other great writers. Now comes John Steinbeck Pulitzer Prize
winner, Nobel laureate, love guru with six tips on writing, culled from his altogether
excellent interview it the Fall 1975 issue of The Paris Review.
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages
and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are
always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never
correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually
found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm
which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

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3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless
audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it
doesnt exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that
sometimes it helps to pick out one persona real person you know, or an
imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it
bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it
and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didnt belong
there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will
usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialoguesay it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the
sound of speech.
But perhaps most paradoxically yet poetically, twelve years prior in 1963,
immediately after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature for his realistic and
imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social
perception Steinbeck issued a thoughtful disclaimer to all such advice:
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able
to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems
to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the
reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the
way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors
that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

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Henry Millers 11 Commandments of Writing and Daily

Creative Routine
When you cant create you can work.

After David Ogilvys wildly popular 10 tips on writing and a selection of advice from
modernitys greatest writers, here comes some from iconic writer and painter Henry
Miller.
In 1932-1933, while working on what would become his first published novel, Tropic of
Cancer, Miller devised and adhered to a stringent daily routine to propel his writing.
Among it was this list of eleven commandments, found in Henry Miller on Writing a
fine addition to these 9 essential books on reading and writing, part of this years
resolution to read more and write better.

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COMMANDMENTS
1.
2.
3.
4.

Work on one thing at a time until finished.

Start no more new books, add no more new material to Black Spring.
Dont be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed
time!

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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

When you cant create you can work.

Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
Dont be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
Discard the Program when you feel like itbut go back to it next day.
Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come
afterwards.

Under a part titled Daily Program, his routine also featured the following wonderful
blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:

24

MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.
If in fine fettle, write.
AFTERNOONS:
Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no
diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.
EVENINGS:
See friends. Read in cafs.
Explore unfamiliar sections on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.
Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.
Paint if empty or tired.
Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.
Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an
occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafs and trains and streets. Cut
the movies! Library for references once a week.

Kurt Vonneguts 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to
speak, your story will get pneumonia.

The year of reading more and writing better is well underway with writing advice the
likes of David Ogilvys 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Millers 11 commandments, Jack
Kerouacs 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbecks 6 pointers, and various
invaluable insight from other great writers. Now comes Kurt Vonnegut anarchist,
Second Life dweller, imaginary interviewer of the dead, sad soul with eight tips on
how to write a good short story, narrated by the author himself.

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1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time
was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things reveal character or advance the
action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make
awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made
of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the
world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell
with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going
on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should
cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Susan Sontag on Writing

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are
going to succeed in writing a body of work.

The newly released volume of Susan Sontags diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed

to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library), from whence Sontags
thoughtful meditations on censorship and aphorisms came, is an absolute treasure trove
of rare insight into one of the greatest minds in modern history. Among the tomes
greatest gifts are Sontags thoughts on the art, craft, and ideology of writing.
Unlike more prescriptive takes, like previously examined advice by Kurt Vonnegut, John
Steinbeck, and David Ogilvy, Sontags reflections are rather meditative sometimes
turned inward, with introspective curiosity, and other times outward, with a lens on the
broader literary landscape yet remarkably rich in cultural observation and universal
wisdom on the writing process, somewhere between Henry Millers creative routine, Jack
Kerouacs beliefs and techniques, George Orwells four motives for writing, and E. B.
Whites vision for the responsibility of the writer.
Gathered here are the most compelling and profound of Sontags thoughts on writing,
arranged chronologically and each marked with the date of the respective diary entry.

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I have a wider range as a human being than as a writer. (With some writers, its the
opposite.) Only a fraction of me is available to be turned into art.
(8/8/64)
Words have their own firmness. The word on the page may not reveal (may conceal) the
flabbiness of the mind that conceived it. > All thoughts are upgrades get more clarity,
definition, authority, by being in print that is, detached from the person who thinks
them.
A potential fraud at least potential in all writing.
(8/20/64)
Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, wont come through.
(8/30/64)
If only I could feel about sex as I do about writing! That Im the vehicle, the medium, the
instrument of some force beyond myself.
(11/1/64)

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Science fiction
Popular mythology for contemporary negative imagination about the impersonal
(11/1/64)
Greatest subject: self seeking to transcend itself (Middlemarch, War and Peace)
Looking for self-transcendence (or metamorphosis) the cloud of unknowing that
allows perfect expressiveness (a secular myth for this)
(undated loose sheets, 1965)
Kafka the last story-teller in serious literature. Nobody has known where to go from
there (except imitate him)
(undated loose sheets, 1965)
John Dewey The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes
indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.
(1/25/65)
I think I am ready to learn how to write. Think with words, not with ideas.
(3/5/70)
Writing is only a substitute [sic] for living. Florence Nightingale
(12/18/70)
French, unlike English: a language that tends to break when you bend it.
(6/21/72)
A writer, like an athlete, must train every day. What did I do today to keep in form?
(7/5/72)
In life, I dont want to be reduced to my work. In work, I dont want to be reduced to
my life.
My work is too austere
My life is a brutal anecdote
(3/15/73)
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break
the readers heart
[]
The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the
first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.
(6/27/73)
Im now writing out of rage and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. Its tonic. I roar
with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as

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I might go to my machine gun. But Im safe. I dont have to face the consequences of
real aggressivity. Im sending out colis pigs ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world.
(7/31/73)
The solution to a problem a story that you are unable to finish is the problem. It
isnt as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem,
properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the
story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
(7/31/73)
Talking like touching
Writing like punching somebody
(8/14/73)
To be a great writer:
know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm)
have moral intelligence which creates true authority in a writer
(2/6/74)
Idea as method of instant transport away from direct experience, carrying a tiny
suitcase.
Idea as a means of miniaturizing experience, rendering it portable. Someone who
regularly has ideas is by definition homeless.
Intellectual is a refugee from experience. In Diaspora.
Whats wrong with direct experience? Why would one ever want to flee it, by
transforming it into a brick?
(7/25/74)
Weakness of American poetry its anti-intellectual. Great poetry has ideas.
(6/14/76)
Not only must I summon the courage to be a bad writer I must dare to be truly
unhappy. Desperate. And not save myself, short-circuit the despair.
By refusing to be as unhappy as I truly am, I deprive myself of subjects. Ive nothing to
write about. Every topic burns.
(6/19/76)
The function of writing is to explode ones subject transform it into something else.
(Writing is a series of transformations.)

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Writing means converting ones liabilities (limitations) into advantages. For example, I
dont love what Im writing. Okay, then thats also a way to write, a way that can
produce interesting results.
(11/5/76)
All art aspires to the condition of music this utterly nihilistic statement rests at the
foundation of every moving camera style in the history of the medium. But it is a clich,
a 19th c[entury] clich, less an aesthetic than a projection of an exhausted state of mind,
less a world view than a world weariness, less a statement of vital forms than an
expression of sterile decadence. There is quite another pov [point of view] about what all
art aspires to that was Goethes, who put the primary art, the most aristocratic one, +
the one art that cannot be made by the plebes but only gaped at w[ith] awe, + that art is
architecture. Really great directors have this sense of architecture in their work always
expressive of immense line of energy, unstable + vital conduits of force.
(undated, 1977)
One can never be alone enough to write. To see better.
(7/19/77)
Two kinds of writers. Those who think this life is all there is, and want to describe
everything: the fall, the battle, the accouchement, the horse-race. That is, Tolstoy. And
those who think this life is a kind of testing-ground (for what we dont know to see
how much pleasure + pain we can bear or what pleasure + pain are?) and want to describe
only the essentials. That is, Dostoyevsky. The two alternatives. How can one write like T.
after D.? The task is to be as good as D. as serious spiritually, + then go on from there.
(12/4/77)
Only thing that counts are ideas. Behind ideas are [moral] principles. Either one is serious
or one is not. Must be prepared to make sacrifices. Im not a liberal.
(12/4/77)
When there is no censorship the writer has no importance.
So its not so simple to be against censorship.
(12/7/77)
Imagination: having many voices in ones head. The freedom for that.
(5/27/78)
Language as a found object
(2/1/79)
Last novelist to be influenced by, knowledgeable about science was [Aldous] Huxley
One reason [there are] no more novels There are no exciting theories of relation of
society to self (soc[iological], historical, philosophical)

30

Not SO no one is doing it, thats all

(undated, March 1979)
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are
going to succeed in writing a body of work
(undated, March 1979)
To write one must wear blinkers. Ive lost my blinkers.
Dont be afraid to be concise!
(3/10/79)
A failure of nerve. About writing. (And about my life but never mind.) I must write
myself out of it.
If I am not able to write because Im afraid of being a bad writer, then I must be a bad
writer. At least Ill be writing.
Then something else will happen. It always does.
I must write every day. Anything. Everything. Carry a notebook with me at all times, etc.
I read my bad reviews. I want to go to the bottom of it this failure of nerve
(7/19/79)
The writer does not have to write. She must imagine that she must. A great book: no one
is addressed, it counts as cultural surplus, it comes from the will.
(3/10/80)
Ordinary language is an accretion of lies. The language of literature must be, therefore,
the language of transgression, a rupture of individual systems, a shattering of psychic
oppression. The only function of literature lies in the uncovering of the self in history.
(3/15/80)
The love of books. My library is an archive of longings.
(4/26/80)
Making lists of words, to thicken my active vocabulary. To have puny, not just little,
hoax, not just trick, mortifying, not just embarrassing, bogus, not just fake.
I could make a story out of puny, hoax, mortifying, bogus. They are a story.
(4/30/80)

Joy Williams on Why Writers Write

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A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.

Why do writers write? Some of literary historys most famous and timeless answers have
come from George Orwell, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Charles Bukowski. In her
beautiful essay Uncanny Singing That Comes from Certain Husks, published in the
1998 anthology Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (public library), Joy
Williams considers the impetus for writing with equal parts insight, irreverence, and that
blend of anguishing ambivalence and convulsive conviction so characteristic of the
writers mind.
Its become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole,
he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole, of course the
writer is not whole, or even particularly well. There is something unwholesome and
destructive about the entire writing process. Writers are like eremites or anchorites
natural-born eremites or anchorites who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole
or into the cave in the first place. Why am I so isolate in this strange place? Why is my
sweat being sold as elixir? And how have I become so enmeshed with works, mere
works, phantoms?
[]
A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just
making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.
(Making contact with the self healing the wound is even less satisfactory.) Writers
end up writing stories or rather, stories shadows and theyre grateful if they can
but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.
She considers the generative power of awareness:
The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant
story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the absurdity, the disorienting
truth, the question that is not even a question, this is the koan of writing.
[]
A writers awareness must never be inadequate. Still, it will never be adequate to the
greater awareness of the work itself, the work that the writer is trying to write. The writer
must not really know what he is knowing, what he is learning to know when he writes,
which is more than the knowing of it. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always
fumbling around in the light. The writer is separate from his work but thats all the writer
is what he writes. A writer must be smart but not too smart. He must be dumb enough
to break himself to harness.

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On complacency:
The moment a writer knows how to achieve a certain effect, the method must be
abandoned. Effects repeated become false, mannered. The writers style is his
doppelgnger, an apparition that the writer must never trust to do his work for him.
Recounting critical reactions to some of her essays, Williams offers:
But a writer isnt supposed to make friends with his writing, I dont think.
On language, and the metaphor from which the essay title comes:
Language accepts the writer as its host, it feeds off the writer, it makes him a husk. There
is something uncanny about good writing uncanny the singing that comes from certain
husks. The writer is never nourished by his own work, it is never satisfying to him. The
work is a stranger, it shuns him a little, for the writer is really something of a fool, so
engaged in his disengagement, so self-conscious, so eager to serve something greater,
which is the writing. Or which could be the writing if only the writer is good enough. The
work stands a little apart from the writer, it doesnt want to go down with him when he
stumbles or fails to retreat. The writer must do all this alone, in secret, in drudgery, in
confusion, awkwardly, one word at a time.
[]
The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life. The work this Other, this
other thing this false life that is even less than the seeming of this lived life, is more
than the lived life, too. It is so unreal, so precise, so unsurprising, so alarming, really.
Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, either is it diversionary,
although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the readers face. Whenever the
writer writes, its always three oclock in the morning, its always three or four or five
oclock in the morning in his head. Those horrid hours are the writers days and nights
when he is writing. The writer doesnt write for the reader. He doesnt write for himself,
either. He writes to servesomething. Somethingness. The somethingness that is
sheltered by the wings of nothingness those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.
Williams ends with a direct yet wonderfully poetic answer:
Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve hopelessly he writes in the hope
that he might serve not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace
which knows us.
A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an awards ceremony for him at the
Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in
our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very
elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear.

33

Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. Another shark. A different shark,
in a different part of the ocean. The ocean is vast.

Charles Bukowski Reads His Friendly Advice to a Lot

of Young Men, Plus Buk on Creativity
The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

Charles Bukowski remains a poet exquisitely emblematic of the inherent contradictions

of the human spirit a man of unabashed profanity and self-conscious sensitivity, of
tragic cynicism and heartening insight on the meaning of life and the spirit of writing. It
is with this lens of his propensity for exaggerated existential extremism underpinned by a
desire to live well that we are to consider Bukowskis 1957 poem Friendly Advice to a
Lot of Young Men, found in the anthology The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early
Selected Poems 1946-1966 (public library). In this rare recording, the poem springs to
irreverent life as Buk reads it himself:

FRIENDLY ADVICE TO A LOT OF YOUNG MEN

Go to Tibet
Ride a camel.
Read the bible.
Dye your shoes blue.
Grow a beard.
Circle the world in a paper canoe.
Subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post.
Chew on the left side of your mouth only.
Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a straight razor.
And carve your name in her arm.
Brush your teeth with gasoline.
Sleep all day and climb trees at night.
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.
Hold your head under water and play the violin.

34

Do a belly dance before pink candles.

Kill your dog.
Run for mayor.
Live in a barrel.
Break your head with a hatchet.
Plant tulips in the rain.
But dont write poetry.
In an interview found in the altogether fantastic Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and
Encounters 1963-1993 (public library), Bukowski unpacks the poem, echoes Apple cofounder Steve Wozniaks admonition that creativity requires solitude and Hemingways
Nobel speech lament that writing, at its best, is a lonely life:
Your poem friendly advice to a lot of young men says that one is better off living in a
barrel than he is writing poetry. Would you give the same advice today?
I guess what I meant is that you are better off doing nothing than doing something badly.
But the problem is that bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones
tend to have self-doubt. So the bad writers tend to go on and on writing crap and giving
as many readings as possible to sparse audiences. These sparse audiences consist mostly
of other bad writers waiting their turn to go on, to get up there and let it out in the next
hour, the next week, the next month, the next sometime. The feeling at these readings is
murderous, airless, anti-life. When failures gather together in an attempt at selfcongratulation, it only leads to a deeper and more, abiding failure. The crowd is the
gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

Elmore Leonards 10 Rules of Writing

If it sounds like writing rewrite it.

On July 16, 2001, Elmore Leonard (October 11, 1925August 20, 2013) made his
timeless contribution to the meta-literary canon in a short piece for The New York Times,
outlining his ten rules of writing. The essay, which inspired the Guardian series that gave
us similar lists of writing rules by Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman, was
eventually adapted into Elmore Leonards 10 Rules of Writing (public library) a slim,

35

beautifully typeset book, with illustrations by Joe Ciardiello accompanying Leonards

timeless rules.

He prefaces the list with a short disclaimer of sorts:

These are rules Ive picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when Im
writing a book, to help me show rather than tell whats taking place in the story. If you
have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you,
invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look
them over.

36

Leonard then goes on to lay out the ten commandments, infused with his signature blend
of humor, humility, and uncompromising discernment:
1. Never open a book with weather.
If its only to create atmosphere, and not a characters reaction to the weather, you
dont want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.
There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to
describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you
want.
2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes
after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a
novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbecks Sweet Thursday, but its O.K. because a
character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: I
like a lot of talk in a book and I dont like to have nobody tell me what the guy
thats talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he
talks. . . . figure out what the guys thinking from what he says. I like some
description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose
with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a
little song with language. Thats nice. But I wish it was set aside so I dont have to
read it. I dont want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.
3. Never use a verb other than said to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his
nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I
once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with she asseverated,
and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb said
he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a
mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that
distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of
my books tell how she used to write historical romances full of rape and
adverbs.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

37

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you
have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can
throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words suddenly or all hell broke loose.
This rule doesnt require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use
suddenly tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with
apostrophes, you wont be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the
flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingways Hills Like White Elephants
what do the American and the girl with him look like? She had taken off her
hat and put it on the table. Thats the only reference to a physical description in
the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with
not one adverb in sight.
9. Dont go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless youre Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write
landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if youre good at it, you dont
want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick
paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is
doing, hes writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the
weather, or has gone into the characters head, and the reader either knows what
the guys thinking or doesnt care. Ill bet you dont skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I cant allow what we
learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.
Its my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with

38

obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way
of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character
the one whose view best brings the scene to life Im able to concentrate on the
voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what
they see and whats going on, and Im nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in Sweet Thursday was title his chapters as an indication,
though obscure, of what they cover. Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts is
one, Lousy Wednesday another. The third chapter is titled Hooptedoodle 1
and the 38th chapter Hooptedoodle 2 as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck
is saying: Heres where youll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing,
and it wont get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.
Sweet Thursday came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and
Ive never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

39

Margaret Atwoods 10 Rules of Writing

40

Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonards 10 rules of writing originally

published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian asked some of
todays most celebrated authors to each produce a list of personal writing
commandments. After 10 from Zadie Smith and 8 from Neil Gaiman, here comes
Margaret Atwood with her denary decree:

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you
cant sharpen it on the plane, because you cant take knives with you. Therefore:
take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the
metal or glass type.
3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm
will do.
4. If youre using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6. Hold the readers attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your
own.) But you dont know who the reader is, so its like shooting fish with a
slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on
reality. This latter means: theres no free lunch. Writing is work. Its also
41

gambling. You dont get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially youre on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so
dont whine.
8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with
that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. Youve been
backstage. Youve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask
a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing
business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic
relationship, unless you want to break up.
9. Dont sit down in the middle of the woods. If youre lost in the plot or blocked,
retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or
change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10. Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualization of the
holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

42

Famous Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of

Great Writers

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Didion, Sontag, Vonnegut, Bradbury, Orwell, and other literary
icons.
By popular demand, Ive put together a periodically updated
reading list of all the famous advice on writing presented
here over the years, featuring words of wisdom from such
masters of the craft as Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Henry
Miller, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Susan Orlean,
Ernest Hemingway, Zadie Smith, and more.
Please enjoy. (If youre unable to scroll within the embed
below, open the full reading list in a new window.)

Ray Bradbury on How List-Making Can Boost Your

Creativity

How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of
your skull.
Susan Sontag argued that lists confer value and guarantee our existence. Umberto Eco
saw in them the origin of culture. But lists, it turns out, might be a remarkably potent
tool for jostling the muse into manifesting a powerful trigger for that stage of

43

unconscious processing so central to the creative process, where our mind-wandering

makes magic happen.
In Zen in the Art of Writing (public library), one of these ten essential books on writing,
Ray Bradbury describes an unusual creative prompt he employed in his early twenties:
He began making long lists of nouns as triggers for ideas and potential titles for stories:
These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was
feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my
skull.
The lists ran something like this:
THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE
BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN.
THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF.
THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.

Bradbury would later come to articulate his conviction that the intuitive mind is what
drives great writing, but it was through these lists that he intuited the vital patternrecognition machinery that fuels creativity. Echoing Einsteins notion of combinatory
play, Bradbury considers the true value of his list-making:
I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on
paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds. Glancing over the
list, I discovered my old love and fright having to do with circuses and carnivals. I
remembered, and then forgot, and then remembered again, how terrified I had been when
my mother took me for my first ride on a merry-go-round. With the calliope screaming

44

and the world spinning and the terrible horses leaping, I added my shrieks to the din. I did
not go near the carousel again for years. When I really did, decades later, it rode me into
the midst of Something Wicked This Way Comes.
So he went on making lists, hoping theyd spark these fruitful associations that the
rational mind tucks away in the cabinets of useless knowledge:
THE MEADOW. THE TOY CHEST. THE MONSTER. TYRANNOSAURUS REX.
THE TOWN CLOCK. THE OLD MAN. THE OLD WOMAN. THE TELEPHONE. THE
SIDEWALKS. THE COFFIN. THE ELECTRIC CHAIR. THE MAGICIAN.
Out on the margin of these nouns, I blundered into a science fiction story that was not a
science-fiction story. My title was R is for Rocket. The published title was King of the
Grey Spaces, the story of two boys, great friends, one elected to go off to the Space
Academy, the other staying home.
Bradbury, who has since shared timeless wisdom on withstanding the storm of rejection,
recalls:
The tale was rejected by every science-fiction magazine because, after all, it was only a
story about friendship being tested by circumstance, even though the circumstance was
space travel. Mary Gnaedinger, at Famous Fantastic Mysteries, took one look at my story
and published it. But, again, I was too young to see that R is For Rocket would be the
kind of story that would make me as a science-fiction writer, admired by some, and
criticized by many who observed that I was no writer of science fictions, I was a people
writer, and to hell with that!
I went on making lists, having to do not only with night, nightmares, darkness, and
objects in attics, but the toys that men play with in space, and the ideas I found in
detective magazines.

45

Susan Sontag's list of her favorite things, illustrated. Click image for details.
But more than merely sharing the amusing story of his youths quirky habit, Bradbury
believes this practice can be enormously beneficial for any writer, both practicing and
aspiring, as a critical tool of self-discovery:
If you are a writer, or hope to be one, similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your
brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.
He offers himself as a testament:
46

I began to run through those lists, pick a noun, and then sit down to write a long prosepoem-essay on it.
Somewhere along about the middle of the page, or perhaps on the second page, the prose
poem would turn into a story. Which is to say that a character suddenly appeared and
said, Thats me; or, Thats an idea I like! And the character would then finish the tale
for me.
It began to be obvious that I was learning from my lists of nouns, and that I was further
learning that my characters would do my work for me, if I let them alone, if I gave them
their heads, which is to say, their fantasies, their frights.
He urges the aspiring writer:
Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness speak softly, and write any
old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page
Shortly before his death, Bradbury speaks to his official biographer, Sam Weller who
also conducted Bradburys lost Comic Con interview and revisits the subject of listmaking in a Paris Review interview:
Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of
your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then,
how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were
disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material.
Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences youve had, the
things youve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So
all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you
do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean?
You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The
night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The
fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin
to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean
to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and youre on
your way to being a good writer. You cant write for other people. You cant write for the
left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write
the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them
down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them.
When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.
(Thats exactly what Roland Barthes did in 1977, to a delightful effect.)

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48