Thinking Like a Writer

You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into. I can't remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: "No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep."

The idea that people aren't always what they seem was a startling notion to more beginning students than I like to acknowledge. I thought everyone knew that a person who smiles all the time may very well have a troubled and even murderous heart. This in turn leads to an analysis of what it means to be a) cynical and b) skeptical, and how, if you're going to write fiction it's more productive to be b than a.

If you're going to write fiction that's even vaguely autobiographical--and which of us hasn't?--in trying to decide what to put in and what to leave out, don't consider what your friends, neighbors and especially your immediate family are going to think and/or say, assuming, that is, that they ever read what you write. You don't want to hurt people deliberately; if you've got the proper skills, you can disguise most people so they won't recognize themselves.

From Anne Bernays in Writers on Writing