Writing Advice from Great Authors to Get You Through NaNoWriMo

Get it Down.
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”
–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Write the Missing Book You Want to See in the Bookstore.
 “There were no books about me, I didn’t exist at all in the literature I had read…this person, this female, this black did not exist.”
–Toni Morrison, quoted in Toni Morrison: Contemporary World Writers by Jill Matus

“If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.”
–Beverly Cleary
Along The Way

Treat Princesses and Chambermaids with Equal Dignity.
“Lucia’s guidance was quiet and subtle, with one memorable exception: the tyranny of the preachy narrator. Write your characters as ghastly as you like, she said, but get off their backs. Chekhov was her hero, for his fierce discipline toward impartiality. A princess and a chambermaid, she said—Chekhov would treat them exactly the same. Lucia let that sink in and then probed to see if I’d internalized that as ennoble the maid. Of course. It was the princess I had to look out for, she said—most writers were likely to dis her. And the maid didn’t need my pity or false praise.”
–Dave Cullen, the author of Columbine, writing about his teacher Lucia Berlin for Vanity Fair.

Don’t Go Visit Mr. Coffee. The Writer is The Person Who Stays In The Room.
“When you’re a writer you spend days in the room without knowing what you’ve got, but you’re still willing to keep reeling it in and following it. You’re willing to be true to it. It may mean you have to write thirty pages to get fifteen. The big secret to such writing is the ability to stay in the room. The writer is the person who stays in the room…all the good writing I’ve done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I wanted to leave the room. I’ve learned to stay there and keep writing. I think, ‘Oh, I’ll just go get some coffee.’ Well, I love coffee, but I don’t really want any coffee at that moment. What’s happened is that I’ve confronted a little problem that’s got me kind of rattled. I can’t identify it. I don’t even know I’m rattled. I just don’t want to go on. A threshold’s come between me and the page, and I want to get out of there. I have a Mr. Coffee in the kitchen and, when I get to it, I find I also have a Mr. Refrigerator. There’s Mr. Kitchen Table, Mr. Newspaper, Mr. Big Long Couch, Mr. World Outside the Window, and honest to god, my career as a writer is over and I’m dead in the water. So I’ve learned to stay there…I’ve learned that the cup of coffee I fix afterwards is really good. Staying in the chair improves the quality of that beverage.”
–Ron Carlson, quoted in Glimmer Train Stories Writers Ask, issue 23
Making It Good

Figure Out What Your Charm is and Hone It.
“Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones’ particular charms.”
–George Saunders, “My Writing Education,” The New Yorker.

Give it A Rest.
Stephen King advises writers to let their books rest for six weeks between drafts. “How long you let your book rest—sort of like bread dough between kneadings—is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks…If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own…With six weeks’ worth of recuperation time, you’ll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. And listen—if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us.”
–Stephen King, On Writing