Writers are continually told to trim their work down, but is that always the best course of action to follow? Not if you don’t know why.

How does one teach those phenomenal, force-of-nature fiction writing students who walk into a classroom with their own identities? With the expectation that the teacher will change, too, writes Steven Wingate in his latest Quotes and Notes column.

”The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” —Cyril Connolly

“Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.” —Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“Stopped hanging other people’s art.”

— a journal entry by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.”

– Simone de Beauvoir

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul’.” –Edgar Allan Poe

Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the Guardian recently asked several contemporary authors for their own rules of writing. Writers such as Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith, and many others answered the call ((Here’s Part One; and here’s Part Two).
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“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

It’s hard to argue with your heroes, though it’s significantly easier after they’ve died. Flannery O’Connor—the first writer I wanted to be—refers in this quote to creative writing workshops, which were just becoming the new standard for writerly apprenticeship when she launched her career. But I don’t have the same issues as she had with the workshop paradigm as it’s now practiced, or with the proliferation of creative writing programs.

“Always give your characters their best shot.” — Stuart M. Kaminsky

As writers, we can add on (and on) to the external details of a character, trying to make that person real in the way that Pinocchio hopes to become so. Theoretically, we might be able to acquire enough details in a personality inventory for our readers to accept our characters as convincing. But ultimately, as Stuart Kaminsky knew, this way of creating character doesn’t work because it’s the subtext of our characters’ lives that make them real. Using the “inventory” process to get to know them is fundamentally flawed because it makes us lazy.