On Writing Advice and the People Who Give It

When you are stuck in a book; when you are well into writing it, and know what comes next, and yet cannot go on; when every morning for a week or a month you enter its room and turn your back on it; then the trouble is either of two things. Either the structure has forked, so the narrative, or the logic, has developed a hairline fracture that will

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn.

“Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.” So in addition to writing furtively at the office, I wrote every night for an hour or more, often in coffeehouses with a notepad and my pen, dr

“But it can’t go on and on like this.” His silence seemed to ask, “Why not?,” and to answer it she made a little explanatory gesture with her free hand. “Without any meaning,” she said. “Anything to hope for.” “But it has been like that from the beginning,” he pointed out, genuinely puzzled. His eyes were still on the road. “You knew that. I never