Sublime

He held himself to no more than 1,000 words a day.

Because writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence.

Of all writing, the discipline in poetry is the most demanding. You have to learn how to distill what you mean into the most economic and at the same time the most elegant and accurate language.

Perkins often told writers: “It is always better to give a little less than the reader wants, than more.”

Good writers of prose must be part poet, always listening to what they write. E. B. White is one of my favorite stylists because I’m conscious of being with a man who cares about the cadences and sonorities of the language. I relish (in my ear) the pattern his words make as they fall into a sentence. I try to surmise how in rewriting the sentence h

Before you start to write and when you think you’ve finished, take a few seconds to ask yourself: ‘What’s this story in five words?’ Have you conveyed that?

audacity was only part of what Perelman was talking about. He was also talking about courage. Humor is the most perilous of writing forms, full of risk; to make a vocation of brightening the reader’s day is an act of continuing gallantry. He was also talking about energy. Energy is the divine spark in creative work. We know right away when we are i

The writer of murder, like all writers, must be a miser, conceding revelations bit by bit; for every novel is a puzzle, and every reader a sleuth.