Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing

Rule No. 9: Have adventures.

Rule No. 2: Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

Rule No. 3: Write what you know. Bellow once said, “Fiction is the higher autobiography.”

Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human, to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.

Rule No. 1: Show and Tell. Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story,

Rule No. 10: Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t.

Rule No. 7: Writer’s block is a tool—use it.