Best-Selling Advice: Craft and Style

“Make your novel readable. Make it easy to read, pleasant to read. This doesn’t mean flowery passages, ambitious flights of pyrotechnic verbiage; it means strong, simple, natural sentences.”

—Laurence D’Orsay

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

—Mark Twain

“You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, ‘This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I’m doing the best I can—buy me or not—but this is who I am as a writer.’”

—David Morrell

“I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

“What a writer has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“Oftentimes an originator of new language forms is called ‘pretentious’ by jealous talents. But it ain’t watcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”

—Jack Kerouac

“You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, ‘your style just isn’t right because you don’t use the really flowery language that romances have.’ My romances—compared to what’s out there—are very strange, very odd, very different. And I think that’s one of the reasons they’re selling.”

—Jude Deveraux

“Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover’s quarrel with the world. It’s ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don’t have to worry about learning things. The fire of one’s art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.”

—James Lee Burke

“We, and I think I’m speaking for many writers, don’t know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is to write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don’t think that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn’t work that way. When the magic comes, it’s a gift.”

—Madeleine L’Engle