Creative writing | Famous quotes on writers' work habits

Many creative writers in the GetSmarter online course have asked me about how they should develop good writing habits. The fact is, writers throughout the ages have struggled to get words down on the page despite the odds. There are many quotes about writing work habits. Below are some of my favourites:
 
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”  - E.L. Doctorow
 
“When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it’s going to be till I’m under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t. But I don’t sit back waiting for it. I work every day.” - Alberto Moravia
 
"When writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out 'Is he as crazy as I am?'" - Joyce Carol Oates

"Fiction is a little like handwriting. It comes out to be you no matter what you do." - John Updike
 
"My subjective experience [of writing] is that each day is some fresh hell" - Dorothy Parker
 
"Write your own name a hundred time and you will be bored; seven hundred times and you will be exasperated; seven thousand times, and your brains will be reeling in your head. Then you realize that you have only written one-tenth of a new novel, and you will be lucky to escape the madhouse. And yet you haven't experienced the full of it. Your own name can at least be written down mechanically. You need have no ideas. You can work like a sweated laborer doing piece-work in a factory. But the novelist has to write down different names, nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives, reeling across the page. They have to make sense." - T.H. White

Elmore Leonard was once asked how he managed to keep the action in his books moving so quickly. He said, "I leave out the parts that people skip."

There are only a few writing rules that novelists have used as a guide through the ages. Hemingway used to write exactly 500 words a day…and stop when he reached 501 no matter how inspired he was. The 18th century German poet Johann Schiller, famously, used to keep rotten apples in his desk. Their pungent smell sparked his creativity. These habits may sound weird, but the Wall Street Journal in the USA recently canvassed some very famous living writers about their work habits, and what came out of it was no less eyebrow raising.

For instance, Richard Powers lounges in bed while he writes, dictating his work into a computer that uses voice recognition software. Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," actually writes in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub. Hilary Mantel, who wrote this year’s Booker Prize winning “Wolf Hall”, takes a shower when writer’s block hits.  

Things get even stranger. Nicholson Baker gets up at 4am and writes sitting in the dark with the computer screen turned off so he cannot actually see what he is writing. He goes back to bed at 6am and then gets up at 8am to edit his work. Michael Ondaatjie, who wrote The English Patient, wrote most of his novels by hand, in school notebooks. Russell Banks works in an old sugar shack near 1,000 metres away from his house. John Wray wrote (and lived) in a tent in a basement in a derelict building before he got famous.

One student of mine wrote an entire novel on a Blackberry.

One of my favorite quotes is from comedian Steve Martin who also wrote a novel: "I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper."


Ronald Irwin is the Course Convener for the Random House Struik Creative Writing Course. Ron is an American professional literary agent, editor and author based in Cape Town, South Africa.

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