On Writing

Most well-written characters have something they want—or something they think they want. The more fascinating characters also have something they don’t want you to know. The best ones also have something they’re not pulling off nearly as well as they think.

Good writing requires the consideration of other minds—after all, words only mean something when another mind decodes them. But bitterness can consider only itself. It demands sympathy but refuses to return it, sucks up oxygen and produces only carbon dioxide. It’s like sadness, but stuck eternally at a table for one.

Asked what he would focus on if he were to teach a writing class, the great essayist Henrik Karlsson said, “Becoming a person who writes well. Writing is not really about having a technical skill set. It’s deeper than that…Figuring out grammar and adverbs or whatever—that is kind of easy. The hard part is working to become a person who can think... See more

lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing

Stories, then, can move in a way pottery or malarial adaptations cannot. All archaeological evidence of contact is accompanied by cultural evidence, but not all cultural evidence of contact is accompanied by archaeological evidence. Stories can echo and refract through and beside the scientific story of mankind. They are special artefacts that cry

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Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live. You can’t accomplish a goal without having one in the first place—writing without a motive is like declaring war on no one in particular

The writer Jorge Luis Borges said, “A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose…All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our... See more

The importance of a writer is continuous… His importance, I think, is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe.