The Heart of the Story

Be very clear about where the heart of the story is, what is most important, what's at stake. Have you managed to stay focused on that? Is that where the energy is coming from? 0r have you digressed onto other things which are easier or flashier?

from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" by Sarah Anne Johnson The Writer's Chronicle September 2002

The Pen is a Formidable Weapon

The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people. (George Dennison Prentice)

Writing as Organic

I don't make any decisions while I'm working. Some people comfort themselves with decisions and work into the interior of the piece, but that's just a different way of doing it. I want my work to have an organic organization-to feel and appear to the reader as if it opens out of itself like an organic thing: like a flower or a piece of fruit. I don't make decisions it about it at the outset. I try to take my cues from the work itself, because if I make decisions I'm going to limit what I can do.

The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2002
An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips by Sarah Anne Johnson

About Editors

Years ago, Ford Madox Ford referred to editors as swinging doors "that authors kick both on entering and leaving." Writer's, of course, tend to describe editors using somewhat different metaphors. Clearly an adversarial relationship is often perceived where, if there were better communication, none needs to exist. Granted, an editor's job is primarily that of a naysayer-at the Georgia Review we are forced to decline over 15,000 manuscripts each year-but that situation only exists because writers freely submit so much work arid would strongly resist any effort to curb that privilege.

One of the questions I am asked frequently at writers' conferences is, "How does it feel to have all the power that goes with being editor of the Georgia Review?" Such a question, it should be noted, is never raised by one aware of how much editing is routine drudgery, how much uncertainty editors have over near-acceptances, how much guilt accumulates over dated correspondence and aging manuscripts still awaiting responses. Power? We're just human beings, making what we hope is a responsible and creative contribution to a literary enterprise that is much larger than any individual writer or editor.

"Of Editors, Writers, and Swinging Doors" by Stanley W. Lindberg
The Writer's Chronicle December 2002

Faulkner

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. (Ernest Hemingway)

Advice from Richard Russo

Russo finds that short stories pose a lesser risk ("If short stories fail, it's a month out of your life-damage control:'), buy are much more difficult for him to write. "They are all about control, which I've never had a lot of. I'm a creature of digression. You can't allow yourself to be distracted."

Yet distraction is exactly what Russo goes after in his writing environment. He prefers to write in diners or busy places, where his mind can wander and make connections. "You can end up where you didn't mean to go, but it's probably more interesting than where you meant to go in the first place:'

Russo's advice to novelists in particular is this: "Whatever you're working on, take small bites. A few pages at a time. Whatever you're working on should be the most exciting thing. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component:'

Also: "Don't keep a journal because you'll think what you remembered to write down was important when it's actually not."

from "Master of the Tragicomedy: Richard Russo" by Jane Friedman

Motion and Action

Never mistake motion for action. (Ernest Hemingway)