experiment’s Reviews > On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft > Status Update

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: ‘Murder your darlings.’
-> You can use anything that improves the quality of your writing and doesn’t get in the way of your story. If it works fine. If it doesn’t, toss it.

You can’t please all the readers all of the time; you can’t please even some of the readers all of the time, but you really ought to try to please at least some of the readers some of the time. I think Shakespeare said that.

Practice is invaluable (and should feel good, really not like practice at all) and honesty is indispensable. Skills in description, dialogue, and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity (and without using a lot of tiresome, unnecessary adverbs).

I would argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing - the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words. [...] You must learn to use it well if you are to write well. What this means is lots of practice; you have to learn the beat.

I would argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing - the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words. [...] You must learn to use it well if you are to write well. What this means is lots of practice; you have to learn the beat.

To write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work.

“sometimes you’re doing good work and it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position”

“The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it”

‘When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.’
‘Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.’
Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it hits out. Once you know what the story is and get it right, it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.