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Susan Sontag writing advice history and literature lit thought and opinion quote

To be a great writer: know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm)

have moral intelligence — which creates true authority in a writer.

Susan Sontag on writing. Pair with the collected wisdom of famous writers.

writing history and literature lit maps culture and society media and communication

Mapping the world’s writing systems. Also see this visual history of how sounds became shapes and this short animation on who invented writing.

Mary Karr writing thought and opinion creativity and innovation culture and society history and literature lit

When was super depressed, I wasn’t working—I was always too depressed. Hemingway did his best work when he didn’t drink, then he drank himself to death and blew his head off with a shotgun. Someone asked John Cheever, “What’d you learn from Hemingway?” and he said “I learned not to blow my head off with a shotgun.” I remember going to the Michigan poetry festival, meeting Etheridge Knight there and Robert Creeley. Creeley was so drunk—he was reading and he only had one eye, of course, and had to hold his book like two inches from his face using his one good eye. But you look at somebody like George Saunders—I think he’s the best short story writer in English alive—that’s somebody who tries very hard to live a sane, alert life.

You’re present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day. It’s probably better for your writing career, you know? I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist.

In an interview with The Fix, Mary Karr debunks the toxic mythology that it is necessary to be damaged in order to be creative. My own vehement defiance to that mythology is what led me to choose Ray Bradbury – the ultimate epitome of creating from joy rather than suffering – as the subject of my contribution to The New York Times’ The Lives They Lived.

Pair with Karr on why writers write.

history and literature lit Raymond Chandler thought and opinion culture and society writing letters

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

Raymond Chandler vs. Atlantic proofreader

quote Samuel Delany writing history and literature media and communication thought and opinion lit

Talented writing tends to contain more information, sentence for sentence, clause for clause, than merely good writing. … It also employs rhetorical parallels and differences… . It pays attention to the sounds and rhythms of its sentences… . Much of the information it proffers is implied. … These are among the things that indicate talent.

Samuel Delany on good writing vs. talented Writing

Dan Brown history and literature lit writing

Dan Brown has revealed how he cures writer’s block.

By hanging upside down.

[He] straps himself to a table in his home gym that rotates him into a position that lets blood — and, it seems, ideas — flow to his head.

Brown, 48, said: “It does help. You’ve just got to relax and let go.
“The more you do it, the more you let go. Then soon it’s just, “Wow”.’

Dan Brown’s cure for writer’s block might seem kooky at first, but those who practice meditation know that headstands and other inversions significantly calm the nervous system and invite clarity of thought.

Complement with the daily routines and daily rituals of other famous writers, then see what some of today’s most exciting artists, writers, and designers do to break through their creative block.

Seth Godin writing advice culture and society media and communication

The best approach is to not try to write things that will go viral. No, the best approach is to write for just one person. Make an impact on just one person. Even better, make it so they can’t sleep that night unless they choose to make a difference for just one other person by sharing your message with them. The rest will take care of itself.

Seth Godin echoes Kurt Vonnegut, who in the seventh of his 8 timeless tips on writing advised, “Write to please just one person.”

Raymond Chandler thought and opinion history and literature lit writing letters

Raymond Chandler’s wisdom on writing, culled from 20+ years of his correspondence.

Raymond Chandler writing history and literature lit thought and opinion quote

Raymond Chandler on writing

Raymond Chandler advice writing history and literature lit thought and opinion culture and society

Raymond Chandler on writing, with an admonition to define your own success and not fall for prestige alone.

writing history and literature lit travel culture and society thought and opinion

A notebook takes on a friendly character, the patina of its daily use, its doodles and coffee stains. It becomes an indispensable artifact of the trip, glowing with revelation.

Writer Paul Theroux on note-taking while traveling, a beautifully analog record of experience in the digital age. Complement with Joan Didion on keeping a notebook, Virginia Woolf on the creative benefits of journaling, and Mary Gordon on the joy of writing by hand.

writing thought and opinion history and literature lit culture and society Andrew O'Hagan

Writing novels is quiet work: it can reveal astonishments but it doesn’t usually proceed from them. Maybe that is why novelists are so often attached to second art forms that wear their physicality or their beauty outwardly.

In a meditation on famous authors in love with other art forms, Andrew O’Hagan seconds Ernest Hemingway’s reflection that “writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”

Also see Nabokov’s butterflies and Sylvia Plath’s drawings, then wash down with famous writers’ collected advice on the craft.

William S. Burroughs history and literature lit writing

On a typical day in the last year of William Burroughs’s life he would awaken in the early morning and take his methadone … and then return to bed. If the day were Thursday, I would arrive at 8:00 A.M. to drive him to his clinic in Kansas City. … At about 9:30 A.M. on all other mornings William would arise and — in his slippers, pajamas, and dressing gown — make his breakfast, sometimes a salted soft-boiled egg with toast, or perhaps fresh-squeezed lemonade, and two cups of very sweet tea. Feeding his many cats at the beginning of each day took up considerable time, only after which would he shave and dress himself, by about noon.

William S. Burroughs’s daily routine. Also see the daily rituals of famous writers.

history and literature thought and opinion culture and society lit writing Virginia Woolf media and communication history and literature

They mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.

Virginia Woolf on words.

Virginia Woolf writing history and literature lit culture and society thought and opinion audio

The only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice, in which she talks about writing and the craftsmanship of language. Transcript, well worth the read, here.