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(Summer 2007)

ASSIGNMENTS
Readings
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Book Reviews/Reports

DESCRIPTION

EXAMS
Midterm
Final

LINKS
Authors
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NOTES

REPORTS

SYLLABUS

WRITERLY ADVICE

NOTE:  ENGLISH 5760 (Literary Nonfiction) was last taught in the fall semester of 1999.  This site is now maintained as an (occasionally updated) archive. 

  Submission & Style Guides 

If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say don't listen to writers talking about writing.
     --Lillian Hellman

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
     --Steven Wright

Times are bad.  Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
     -- Cicero

There is no rule on how to write.  Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
    -- Ernest Hemingway

Many people hear voices when no one is there.  Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the
walls all day.  Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
     -- Meg Chittenden

What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.
    -- John Mortimer

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.
      --Fran Lebowitz

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
    -- Henry David Thoreau

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
      -- Kingsley Amis

There are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; and the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.
    -- Quentin Crisp

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
     -- Peter de Vries

The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them. A young writer must cross many psychological barriers to acquire confidence in his capacity to produce good work--especially his first full-length book--and he cannot do this by staring at a
piece of blank paper, searching for the perfect sentence.
    -- Paul Johnson

How do I know what I think, until I see what I say.
     --W.H. Auden

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.  . . .  Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
     --E. L. Doctorow

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.
     -- Sharon O'Brien

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
    -- Thomas Berger

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
     -- Jack London

No professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it. If he waits till he is in the mood, till he has the inspiration, he waits indefinitely and ends by producing little or nothing. The professional writer creates the mood. He has his inspiration too, but he controls and subdues it to his bidding by setting himself
regular hours of work.  But in time writing becomes a habit, and like the old actor in retirement, who gets restless when the hour arrives at which he has been accustomed to go down to the theatre and make up for the evening performance, the writer itches to get to his pens and paper at the hours at which he has been used to write. Then he writes automatically.
     -- Somerset Maugham

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute.  If you didn't behave that way
you would never do anything.
     -- John Irving

You know . . . that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at. The wall of a museum--a canvas--a piece of film--or a guy
sitting in front of a typewriter.  Then, you start out to do something--that vague thing called creation.  The beginning strikes awe within you.
     -- Edward Steichen

The ideal view for daily writing, hour on hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse.  Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.
    -- Edna Ferber

There's nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open up a vein.  
     -- Walter Smith

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
    -- Gene Fowler

Writing is just work.--there's no secret.  If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes--it's still just work.
     --Sinclair Lewis

Writing is not hard.  Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you.  The writing is easy--it's the occurring that's hard.
     --Stephen Leacock

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
    --Samuel Johnson

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
    --Gloria Steinem

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
     -- Robert Heinlein

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the
philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
     -- Larry McMurtry

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.  Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master.  Read!  You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out.   If it's not, throw it out the window.
    --William Faulkner

My advice to memoir writers is to embark upon a memoir for the same reason that you would embark on any other book: to fashion a text.   Don't hope in a memoir to preserve your memories.  If you prize your memories as they are, by all means avoid--eschew--writing a memoir.  Because it is a certain way to lose them.  You can't put together a memoir without cannibalizing your own life for parts.  The work battens on your memories.  And it replaces them.
     --Annie Dillard, "To Fashion a Text"

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
     -- Mark Twain

The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
    --Oscar Wilde

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
     -- Tom Clancy

The writer's only responsibility is to his art.  He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.  He has a dream.  It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it.  He has no peace until then.  Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.  If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.
     --William Faulkner

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
     --Alice Walker

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
     --Rudyard Kipling

To improve one's style means to improve one's thoughts.
      -- Frederick Nietzsche

Half my life is an act of revision.
     --John Irving

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.  This is the writer's radar and all good writers have it.
     -- Ernest Hemingway

Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
     -- Samuel Johnson

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it . . . and delete it before sending your manuscript to the press.
    -- Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

The first draft of anything is shit.
     -- Ernest Hemingway

I find that I can criticize my composition best when I stand at a little distance from it--when I do not see it, for instance. 
     -- Henry David Thoreau

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
     --James Michener

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say.  A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing
connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.
     -- G. M. Trevelyan

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.   Art is knowing which ones to keep.
     -- Scott Adams

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.   It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand.  But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen.  It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.
     -- Barbara Tuchman

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
     -- Mark Twain

Vigorous writing is concise.
    -- William Strunk

Dear Mister Language Person: I am curious about the expression, "Part of this complete breakfast."  The way it comes
up is, my 5-year-old will be watching TV cartoon shows in the morning, and they'll show a commercial for a children's
compressed breakfast compound such as "Froot Loops" or "Lucky Charms," and they always show it sitting on a table
next to some actual food such as eggs, and the announcer always says: "Part of this complete breakfast."  Don't that really
mean, "Adjacent to this complete breakfast," or "On the same table as this complete breakfast"? And couldn't they make
essentially the same claim if, instead of Froot Loops, they put a can of shaving cream there, or a dead bat?  Answer: Yes.
     -- Dave Barry

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
     --Mark Twain

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
     -- T. S. Eliot

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers.  My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
     -- Flannery O'Connor

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
     --Richard Bach