writing-craft

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

A dear and long-time friend,... asked me, "Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?" I replied, "Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its own rules. But for a statement to the world at large, once I've thought a book through and written it in my mind, it takes me around a week or so, depending on this and that, ordinarily at the rate of a chapter a day, but I've had some two-chapters day and some chapters have taken two days. And then of course there is revision, but around a week is about right." He seemed surprised, and I was surprised by his surprise, so I thought, maybe I'm wrong. I went home and wrote this book, at the perfectly normal pace of a chapter a day, as usual...

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

Thousands of years ago, there were no writers; just storytellers. I would love to be a storyteller but I am just a writer. I don__ appeal to the ears; I appeal to the mind.

You could say, in a way, that I'm not actually a writer, though perhaps I might be called a recorder? ... I just happen to be one of those holding the pen, that's all.

What you need to remember is that there__ a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.

Telling a story is like playing a fiddle. No one want's to hear it when it's done badly

Voice is really about letting your characters loose.

To my mind, the most important thing in any form of fiction is the human element, but only if it takes us beyond the everyday, into situations that examine the complexities that may fascinate or puzzle us. To dwell on the mundane as some kind of a writing exeercise is useless.

...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...

The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow!

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

Writing is my oxygen. Music is my carbon dioxide.

Most people say, __how, don__ tell,_ but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they__e like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.