“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.

“Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.” –Margaret Atwood

“Every book I publish is an opportunity for me to reinvent myself as a writer.” — Steve Katz

The easy thing to do when we finish one writing project, the default thing, is to simply think about what we’re going to write next. Katz’s words, however, call us to engage in a deeper kind of reconsideration of ourselves, because what we write and who we are as writers are two crucially different things.

“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller, and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.” — Leonardo da Vinci

“You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

Consider Hurston’s words in the context of note-taking and revision, which we normally don’t think of as particularly inspired phases of the fiction process. Preparing the canvas can be a long and dreadful bore; we learn about our characters in slow motion, wanting to write the work itself but knowing that we aren’t yet ready. We synopsize, sometimes outline, sometimes take copious notes that we then ignore completely.