“I was turned down for ten years. I couldn’t get a thing in print. My writing went nowhere. I guess you have to be persistent. Talent is just one element of the writing business. You also have to have a stubborn nature. That’s rarer even than the talent, I think. You have to be grimly determined. I certainly was disappointed; I got upset. But you have to go back to the desk again, to the mailbox once more, and await your next refusal.”

—William Gass, from a 1995 interview with BOMB

“‘I simply imagined,’ [Faulkner said of As I Lay Dying] ‘ a group of people and subjected them to the simple universal natural catastrophes which are flood and fire with a simple natural motive [burial] to give direction to their progress'” (111).

Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction

One of the many benefits of reading The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is that, in addition to being an excellent novel, it includes a list of short (about 200 pages or two hours to read) novels. Once my current stack of books is a little shorter, I’ll try reading or rereading books on this list.

• Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
• Sula by Toni Morrison
• The Shadow-Line by Jospeh Conrad
• The All of It by Jeannette Haien
• Winter in the Blood by James Welch
• Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle
• The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
• First Love by Ivan Turgenev
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
• Fire on the Mountain by Anita Desai

Seen through the eyes of its characters, the world of the novel seems closer and more comprehensible to us. It is this proximity that lends the art of the novel its irresistible power. Yet the primary focus is not the personality and morality of the leading characters, but the nature of their world. The life of the protagonist, their place in the world, the way they feel, see, and engage with their world – this is the subject of the literary novel.

Orhan Pamuk in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

There’s something epistemological about storytelling. It’s the way we know each other, the way we know ourselves, the way we know the world. It’s also the way we don’t know: the way the world is kept from us, the way we’re kept from knowledge about ourselves, the way we’re kept from understanding other people.

–Andrea Barrett

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it’s raining, but the feel of being rained upon.

–E.L. Doctorow

What are differences between writing a personal essay and fiction? Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi’s Bringing the Devil to His Knees includes Margot Livesey’s essay, which addresses this question.

How much do you need to plan a short story before you begin writing it? Consider Donald Barthelme’s essay “Not-knowing.”

Memory, according to Bergson, occupies the space between mind and body. It conveys mind to body and body to mind. It gives us our quality of life—makes possible, in other words, the narrative that keeps our lives going forward to the next thing. If the thing is not next it loses its richness—isolated and unlinked to a history, it becomes meaningless, even ridiculous. Biologically and neurologically, we are creatures of context, of narrative. . . . By nature, then, the activity of the neuron is narrative, metonymic, associative.

–Karen Brennan