A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction

Author and writing teacher McCracken acknowledges and rejects many commonly dispensed "rules" of writing: write every day, kill your darlings, don't use adverbs. She muses on plot, character, and setting, and how they're all connected; she differentiates between plot and event. Short numbered entries range in length from a single sentence to paragraphs to a page or two.

Quotes

What we love is inspiring, but what we hate is instructive. (6)

Ambition in fiction is merely the willingness to make mistakes. (13)

Writing is a form of thought. (14)

That might be my number one piece of advice for young writers: find the hardest-working writers you know; take one another seriously. (17)

Objects always conjure the past. (22)

No process is wrong that show more leads to the first draft of a book. (41)

Fiction gives us the ability to know strangers, multiple and singular, from the inside and the outside, to feel the vibrating border between out and in. (44)

Lower the bathysphere into the ocean so you can describe the ocean, not solely the inside of the bathysphere and the pilot. (51)

Fiction is made of words. It's good to tell you [sic] readers things. That act of telling can free a reader's attention up so they can interpret instead of decoding. (59)

Probably I became a writer to fathom other people, fathom in the sense of dropping a weight inside to see how deep they go. (102)

What happens when inner life meets outer life? That's the most interesting question in fiction. (118)

...you might write fiction that answers the question, How did this character get this way? ...Much better to ask: Given that a character is this way, what do they do? (124)

All good language is economical; that is, it doesn't spend more than it needs to achieve the desired effect. (141)

All fiction is a body of water: language is the surface....It teaches you how to read it and you fall in, and the language is something you swim though that shows you the world of the book. (145)

Every good short story has a bomb ticking in its heart. A writer's first instinct will be to defuse it, to save the characters. It's not your job to defuse it. It's your job to let the bomb go off. That often doesn't happen till the next draft. (152-153)

The way you teach yourself to write a novel is by writing a novel. No other art form is like this. (154)

If you do love teaching, you must be careful not to give up the long-term gratification of writing for the short-term gratitude of colleagues and students. (172) show less