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ON CRAFT
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The first and last important rule for
the creative writer, then, is that though
there may be rules (formulas) for ordinary,
easily publishable fiction — imitation
fiction — there are no rules for real fiction,
any more than there are rules for serious
visual art or musical composition. — John Gardner
The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
— Donald Barthelme
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are
paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky. — William Faulkner
You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me
you've had a reason to do so. — Hans Hoffman
Study the rules so that you won't beat
yourself by not knowing something. — Babe Didricksen Zaharias
Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction.
In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently
describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says,
"I knew girls who saved his gum." — Amy Hempel
Everyone has one good poem in his hidden head. —
Don Welch
The hard part is getting to the top of page 1. — Tom Stoppard
You have to know the human heart. — Thom Jones
I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry /
as I needed it — John Cage
I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the
others. — Molière
Be obscure clearly. — EB White
I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write
and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or
twelve years to get written. — Sherwood Anderson
It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless
drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations
on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore.
I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is
tough for me. No, I am not inspired. — James Dickey
The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below
the conscious mind. — Loren Eiseley
There is no iron that can enter the human heart with
such stupefying effect, as a period placed at just the
right moment. — Isaac Babel, from “Guy de Maupassant”
Wake the happy words. — Theodore Roethke
The drummer's job is to stay out of the way. — Joe Williams
Make the drummer sound good. — Steve Lacy
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I
turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have
lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and
turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn
them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and
throw them out and start from the beginning. — Philip Roth
The secret is to start a story near the ending. — Chris Offut
Art is elimination of the unnecessary. — Waldo Salt.
My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn't getting on. It's a series of well-turned, ordered paragraphs which do not flow on from each other. I shall have to unscrew them, loosen the joints, as one does with the masts of a ship when one wants the sail to take more wind...
— Gustave Flaubert
Homer: "Marge, is this a happy ending or a sad ending?"
Marge: "It's an ending. That's enough." — The Simpsons
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so
pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily.
Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of
an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. — Virginia Woolf
I have written a great many stories and I still don't
know how to go about it except to write it and take my
chances. — John Steinbeck
The best stories don't come from "good vs bad" but from "good vs good."
— Leo Tolstoy
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that
he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it. — Mark Twain
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is
something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the
philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb
or two. — Larry McMurtry
I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability
and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and
old ladies of vested reviewing.
— Norman Mailer
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. — Truman Capote
Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly. ...
And
because it is often by describing the thing lost — a family, a moment
of happiness, a child, a father — that we understand the full weight
of what we had. — Bill Buford
Are all your stars shining? — JD Salinger
Never be sincere — sincerity is the death of writing. — Gordon
Lish
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around
it. — Anthony Burgess
There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in
the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over. — Sam Shepard
Easy reading is damn hard writing. — Nathaniel Hawthorne
Writing itself is an act of faith, and nothing else.
EB White
I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back
turned to me. — Robert Bly
Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing. — Ezra Pound
Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be
just as it should be. — Mark Twain
Write about it by day, and dream about it by night. — EB White
Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just
roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your
subject. — EB White
Try to be one on whom nothing is lost. — Henry James
Sincerity is technique. — WH Auden
Remarks aren't literature. — Gertrude Stein
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader
must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to
achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet
full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.
— Barbara Tuchman
The big secret is the ability to stay in the room.
— Ron Carlson
In this art form, in any art form, generalities are useless. —
Zubin Mehta
You learn from music, from watching great athletes at
work — how disciplined they are, how they move.
You learn these things by watching a shortstop at work,
how he concentrates on one thing at a time. You learn from
classic music, from the blues and jazz, from bluegrass.
From all this, you learn how to sustain a great line
without bringing in unnecessary words. — Ernest Gaines
Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
— Gene Fowler
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that
which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there
anything whereof it may be
said, see, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us. —
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will
set off a revolution. — Paul Cezanne
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
— Anton Chekhov
Drama is a gun that doesn't go off. — Jonis Agee
Life stand still here. — Virginia Woolf
Art is the lie that tells the truth. — Pablo Picasso
Writing itself is an act of faith, and nothing else. — EB White
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. — Anne Lamott
Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw
out a good line. — Theodore Roethke
You don't want to OD on improvisation. — Patti Smith
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are
paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky. — William Faulkner
You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me
you've had a reason to do so. — Hans Hoffman
Everyone has one good poem in his hidden head. —
Don Welch
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand —
a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods — or it should be
an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand,
something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with
standardized values. — Willa Cather
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen become
bouillon cubes. — John LeCarre
The hard part is getting to the top of page 1. — Tom Stoppard
You have to know the human heart. — Thom Jones
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. ...
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way. — EL Doctorow
How do I know what I think, until I see what I say. — WH Auden
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. — Scott Adams
I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the
others. — Molière
What one wants to do with stories is screw them up. — William Gass
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it's like drilling rock and then
blasting it out with charges. — Ernest Hemingway
I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation
between good and evil. — William Styron
Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time. — Michelangelo
All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure. — Peter
Carey
I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition. —
Ethan Canin
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always
deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this
till she is pretty far along with it. A novel’s whole pattern is rarely
apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the
writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of
understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is
finding the theme. — Diane Johnson
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on
penny candy. — William Gass
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
— Mark Twain
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
— Tom Clancy
Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn, as a moth to the flame,
by edge situations, by situations of metamorphosis. — E Annie Proulx
Push your sentences until they say something interesting. Here's a tiny
example, from Denis Johnson's story "Work." A badly hung-over man is helping
a friend salvage copper wiring from his ruined house: "I felt weak. I had to
vomit in a corner — just a thimbleful of gray bile." Picture the second
sentence stopping at the word "corner;" picture it minus the word
"thimbleful." Keep coming back to your work. Sneak up on it. You don't have
to solve all the problems at once. The more sittings, the more likely you
are to find unusual things to add. — David Long
The friends that have I do it wrong
Whenever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.
William Butler Yeats
It is a cheap trick merely to surprise and shock the reader, especially at
the expense of logic. And a lack of invention on the writers' part cannot
be covered up by sensational action and clever prose. It is also a kind of
laziness to write the obvious, which does not entertain, really. The idea
is an unexpected turn of events, reasonably consistent with the characters
of the protagonists. Stretch the reader's credulity, his sense of logic,
to the utmost — it is quite elastic — but don't break it. In
this way, you will write something new, surprising and entertaining both
to yourself and the reader. — Patricia Highsmith
The high note is not the only thing. — Placido Domingo
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and
education — sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across
the street. — EB White
Often I'll find clues to where the story might go by figuring out where the
characters would rather not go. — Doug Lawson
Too many poets write poems which are only difficult on the surface,
difficult because the dramatic situation is easily misunderstood. It's not
difficult to write poems that are misunderstood. A drunk, a
three-year-old-they are easily misunderstood. What is difficult is being
clear and mysterious at the same time. The dramatic situation needs to be
as clear in a poem as it is in a piece of good journalism. The why is part
of the mystery, but the who, what, where, and when should all be
understood. — Miller Williams
What I don't write is as important as what I write. — Jamaica Kincaid
The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up,
ultimately teaches you how to write. — Gabriel Fielding
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual
extinction of personality. — TS Eliot
There is no method but to be very
intelligent. — TS Eliot
There is no method except yourself. — Harold Bloom
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years
at least. — Horace
When the Lord finished the world, He pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work,
too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious early opinions.
— Mark Twain
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That
is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't
let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No,
I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They weaken
when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective
habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get
rid of as any other vice. — Mark Twain
Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools oyu
have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it
wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.)
Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length
of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of
people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among
them even to begin. — Annie Dillard
Sentiment and nostalgia are fatal for fiction. One must go into the
territory of the imagination with sure
feet, hot fainting with glorious misery. — Lynn Freed
Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot
independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist. — David Mamet
Successful people bore me as fictional creations. — Stephen Dixon
I wrote a few children's books ... not on purpose. — Steven Wright
There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature.
That's what you ought to write about. — Raymond Carver
Who am I? What will I be? Why am I here? Where am I going? — Constantin
Stanislavski
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquility; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action,
the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that
which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does
itself actually exist in the mind .—William Wordsworth
I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a
claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who
claims to understand but is obviously calk, someone who claims to write
with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To
understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven. ... I
admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event. —
Harold Brodkey
And yet, we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may
result in ... tiresome acrobatics. ... Flashy effects distract the mind.
They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very
intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through
it at every other step. ...
When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than
your idea, it is time to quit. — Katherine Anne Porter
Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely
accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with
that. — Pearl Buck
Nobody wants to see the village of the happy people. — Lew Hunter
Novels are like marriages. You have to
get into the mood to write them — not because of what writing them
is going to be like, but because it's so sad to end them. When I finished
my first book, I really felt like I'd fallen in love with
my main character and that she'd died. You have to understand,
writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish,
then you kill that thing, which
was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're
supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and
stuff. Characters in stories are different. They come alive in the
corners of your eyes. You don't have to live with them. — David
Foster Wallace
To make your unknown known — that's the important thing. —
Georgia O'Keefe
Writing means revealing oneself to excess. — Franz Kafka
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
— Ernest Hemingway
If you're looking for messages, try Western Union. — Ernest Hemingway
Make it new. — Ezra Pound
Poets are interested mostly in death and commas. — Carolyn Kizer
The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with
your friends. — Robert Bly
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. — Socrates
At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument. —
Richard Ford
Write the truest sentence that you
know. — Ernest Hemingway
I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of
slight efforts. — Andre Gide
What is written without effort is in general read without
pleasure. — Samuel Johnson
You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in. — Samuel
Goldwyn to screenwriters Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond
Always make room for the unexpected in yourself. — Steve Martin
He who knows best knows how little he knows. — Thomas Jefferson
You can't be afraid to deal with your demons. You've got to go there
to be able to write. — Lucinda Williams
Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King
If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you
really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist
except he was a Realist. — John Barth
I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is
the only way to make people see. — Flannery O’Connor
Writer's block ... is simply a failure of ego. — Norman Mailer
Oh it is only a novel!.... in short, only some work in which the greatest
powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of
human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest
effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen
language. — Jane Austen
Let's say you're writing the story from Della's point of view. You can
say, "Della looked up into Rodney's adoring face," but you can't say,
"Della raised her incredibly beautiful violet eyes to Rodney's adoring
face." Why not? Because although Della may be aware she's incredibly
beautiful and has violet eyes, that's not what Della sees when she
looks up. That's what Rodney sees. And Della is the person whose
mind you're in. Only Della's perceptions are perceptible. Rodney's aren't.
And if Della really is thinking about the color of her own eyes, instead
of how adorably adoring Rodney looks, you have to explain why: "She raised
her eyes, knowing the effect their violet beauty would have on him."
If this still seems mysterious, consider that the limited third person
is very like the first person in some ways; and you know that when you
write as "I" you can tell only what "I" see and know. — "I raised my
incredibly beautiful violet eyes to Rodney's adoring face." I'm sure you
see what you wouldn't write that. — Ursula LeGuin
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but
the illustration of character? — Henry James
Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses,
adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin,
and crossings of legs.
When people communicate, they communicate with their faces,
their bodies,
their timing, and the objects around them. Makes this a
full conversation.
Not just the words part.
The argument itself shouldn’t take place in a spatial vacuum.
Where people talk is important. In a Jenn-Air-equipped kitchen?
In the restaurant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?
Setting is like
another character.
Conversations are like icebergs — only the very tops are visible.
Most of their weight, their mass, their meanings are under the
surface. Make your readers feel the tension between what is above and
what’s below, and you’ll have a story. — Jerry Stern
In what we think of as bad dialogue, the characters talk directly to each
other. — Diane Johnson
I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected
with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel,
and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely
from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write
from. — Flannery O'Connor
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the
first time. — Ernest Hemingway
In art economy is always beauty. — Henry James
We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to
form, but to technique, to technical efficiency
itself. — Czeslaw Milosz
Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its
characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for
its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving
ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?... — Eudora
Welty
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
— Mark Twain
God is in the details. — Mies van der Rohe
Detail is the lifeblood of fiction. — John Gardner
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious,
and conscious where he
ought to be unconscious. — TS Eliot
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ...
Of course, it rarely ends that way. — Kashua Ishigura
What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a
great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously
schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its
frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole
landscape with a single splendid flash. — Mark Twain
I always stopped when I knew what was going to
happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. —
Ernest Hemingway
Name names. Make your writing physical. Use lots of exact nouns. "Food" is
an idea; "black-bean soup" is a thing. Naming not only makes the writing
more visceral, it makes the reader trust you. And use your own expertise,
whatever "insider information" you have. Use words like soffit, draw
shave, spit valve. — David Long
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
— Simone Weil
Load every rift with ore. — John Keats
Fill the moment and find variety. — Paul Newman
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without
incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
— Henry James
No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with
complete sincerity; the clichés
that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn
situations, the commonplace
story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn
nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot
write anything that will convince unless you are
yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his
heart's blood. — Somerset Maugham
Crowding is what Keats meant when he told poets to "load every rift with
ore." It's what we mean when we exhort ourselves to avoid flabby language
and clichés, never to use ten vague words where two will do,
always to seek the vivid phrase, the exact word. By crowding I mean also
keeping the story full, always full of what's happening in it; keeping it
moving, not slacking and wandering into irrelevancies; keeping it
interconnected with itself, rich with echoes forward and backward. Vivid,
exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose
that is crowded with sensations, meanings, and implications.
But leaping is just as important. What you leap over is what you leave
out. And what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in.
There's got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice.
Listng is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in
the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are
correct. ... Tactically speaking, I'd say go ahead and crowd in the first
draft — put everything in. Then in revising decide what counts, what
tells; and cut and recombine till what's left is what counts. Leap boldly.
— Ursula LeGuin
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg.
There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part
that shows. — Ernest Hemingway
Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened. — Wallace Stegner
The funniest things are the forbidden. ... The humorous story is told
gravely;
the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly
suspects that there is anything funny about it. — Mark Twain
Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story: first, he said,
throw out the first three pages. As a young writer I figured that if
anybody knew about short stories, it was Chekhov, so I tried taking his
advice. I really hoped he was wrong, but of course he was right. It
depends on the length of the story, naturally; if it's very short, you can
only throw out the first three praragraphs. But there are few first
drafts to which Chekhov's Razor doesn't apply. Starting a story, we all
tend to circle around, explain a lot of stuff, set things up that don't
need to be set up. Then we find our way and get going, and the story
begins ... very often just about on page 3.
In revision, as a rough rule, if the beginning can be cut, cut it. And
if any passsage sticks out in some way, leaves the main trajectory, could
possibly come out — take it out and see what the story looks like
that way. Often a cut that seemed sure to leave a terrible hole joins up
without a seam. It's as if the story, the work itself, has a shape it's
trying to achieve, and will take that shape if you'll only clear away the
verbiage. — Ursula LeGuin
What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting,
is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say.
A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing
connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.
— G. M. Trevelyan
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
— James Michener
Revision, once well done, becomes a sort of automatic itch which you
scratch in the next work without thinking about it. — Romulus Linney
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.
This is the writer's radar and all good writers have it.
— Ernest Hemingway
Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which
you think is particularly fine, strike it out. — Samuel Johnson
We are constantly telling ourselves what we most want to know, and at the
same time are deaf to it. Why does envy have such a fierce bite? Why do we
fall silent or get worried just as our story is about to spring out of our
control and into its own life? Whose shadow falls across the page? —
Bonnie Friedman
The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your
satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what
it is that you really want to say. — Mark Twain
How you do anything is how you do everything. — Zen proverb
The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye. — Donald
Hall, "Poet at Twenty"
I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged
would blow their brains out,
they could write very much better when they got well. — Mark Twain
If you succeed not, cast not away the quills yet, nor scratch the wainscot,
beat not the poor desk, but bring all to the forge and file again; turn it
new. — Ben Jonson
Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing
desire to work hard at writing. — Donald Hall
Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of
paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me.
But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there
ready for it. — Flannery O'Connor
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can
there ever be. — Doris Lessing
From a technical point of view there are two essential things to solve or
create when writing a novel. The first is the invention of the narrator. I
think the narrator is the most important character in a novel. In some
cases this importance is obvious because the narrator is also a central
figure, a central character in the novel. In other cases, the narrator is
not a character, not a visible figure, but an invisible person whose
creation is even more complicated and difficult than the creation of one
of the characters.
When I wrote The Time of the Hero, I was not aware of the role
of the narrator, I was not conscious of it. Instinctively, I discovered
that the creation of the narrator is extremely important because if you
are not coherent in establishing the laws under which the narrator works,
develops the action, approaches the action, or takes a distance from the
action he is narrating, then the whole persuasive force of the novel will
disappear. Therefore, coherence is what is important. You can give any
kind of power to the narrator, but always within a coherent system. If the
system is clear and coherent, the novel's power of persuasion will be
achieved. If not, if there are incoherences and the narrator acts in an
arbitrary way, this immediately translates into disbelief for the reader.
The reader feels that something is wrong, that what he has been told is
not really happening but has been imposed on him peremptorily. And so the
narrator must be faithful to the laws that create the system of narration
in a novel.
The second essential problem a novelist should solve is the
organization of time. The narrator and time give fiction its sovereignty,
its independence from the real world. A novel is never similar to the real
world; a novel is always a separate world, a world that has something
essentially different from real reality. It is a fictitious reality that
is always in opposition to real reality. The difference between fictitious
reality and real reality is the presence of this narrator, which in real
reality does not exist, and of the time structure, which in fiction is
never similar to that of real life. Chronology, the organization of time,
and the way in which time flows in fiction are different from real time;
and the organization of time is one of the aspects in which you can trace
the originality of a fictitious world. The way in which each novelist,
each fiction writer organizes the time structure is what gives his
literary work its originality and, again, its sovereignty. — Mario
Vargas Llosa
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel
tells us the truth about its author. — GK Chesterton
Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis
of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations ... — Virginia Woolf
The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is
your story, and then your story — and then your story!
— Ford Madox Ford
The first draft of everything is shit. — Ernest Hemingway
When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy
it. — Anatole France
I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.
— Saul Bellow
...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting
way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.
— Anne Lamott
Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal. — TS Eliot
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel]
and be
excused for it. In a short story that’s next to the poem, almost every
word has
got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless
but in the short
story you can’t. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote.
That’s why I rate that second — it’s because it demands a nearer absolute
exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless.
There’s less room in it for trash. — William Faulkner
The complete novelist would come into the world
with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the
concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational
ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into
human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the
discipline of a man who prints the Lord's Prayer on
the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an
Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct
and flair for exceptional use of language. — Leon Uris
The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea
and then spoiling it. — Diane Johnson
A good poem is almost always good housekeeping. — Don Welch
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing. —
Alice Munro
I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done. — Steven Wright
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. / Something will come to
you. — Richard Wilbur
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief
sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern
way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and
verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't
mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable.
They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they
are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit,
once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
— Mark Twain
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. — Jessamyn West
On the whole, audiences prefer that art be not a mirror held up
to life, but a Disneyland of the soul, containing Romanceland,
Spyland, Pornoland and all the other escapelands which are so
much more agreeable than the complex truth. — Geoffrey Wiseman
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu. —
William Stafford
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and
seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write
with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it
on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to
it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright
and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet,
but unused. — Ernest Hemingway
There is one story and one story only. — Robert Graves
You have to talk to the stone, and it has to talk to you. —
Ben Nighthorse Campbell
A novelist can shift view-point if it comes off. ... Indeed, this power to
expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a
symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge — I find one of the
great
advantages of the novel-form ... this intermittence lends in the long run
variety and colour to the experiences we receive. — EM Forster
The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story
as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell
itself. — Percy Lubbock
[T]he visibility of styles is itself
a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion
of "style" needs to be approached
historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and
isolable element in a work of art
has emerged in the audience for art only at certain
historical moments — as a
front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political,
are being debated. — Susan Sontag
I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of
specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel — the
merit upon which all its other merits ... hopelessly and submissively
depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there,
they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced
the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this
exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art
of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his
torment, and his delight. — Henry James
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows
what they are. — W Somerset Maugham
There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, / And every
single one of them is right. — Rudyard Kipling
There are three necessary elements in a story — exposition,
development,
and drama. Exposition we may illustrate as "John Fortescue was a
solicitor in the little town of X"; development as "One day Mrs Fortescue
told him she was about to leave him for another man"; and drama as
"You will
do nothing of the kind," he said. — Frank O'Connor
Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions — what we do
— that we
are happy or the reverse. ... All human happiness and misery take the form
of action. — Aristotle
Things in motion sooner catch the eye / Than what not stirs. — William
Shakespeare
Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events
inspiring fear and pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events
come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same
time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be
great than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even
coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. —
Aristotle
The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction
writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the
senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with
abstractions. — Flannery O'Connor
At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite.
They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their
readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language,
these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With
maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real
tone and develops a simple and effective style. — Jorge Luis Borges
Obscenities are too often used for shock value, as a kind of shorthand for
real expression of emotion. You've got to scale down your monstrosities. A
scream is not a discovery. — John L'Heureux
To write simply is as difficult as to be good. — W Somerset Maugham
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. — William
Shakespeare
In composing, as a general rule, run a pen through every other
word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give
your style. — Sydney Smith
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
"objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. —
TS Eliot
Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or
overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've
forgotten. As someone said, one writes
mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to
inhabit the material fully. — Ted Solotaroff
When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own
hair. — Robert Stone
Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush.
— Pete Murphy
So I made an outline. Well, you know, days are going by, and I am not
writing anything because
this thing is laid out in front of me. It's as if you get every
brochure for a trip you are going to go on and you get the minutest details
of every step along the way. Well, I really doubt you're going to then get
in the car and go. You know, it's like, why bother if it's all laid out
in front of you? — Steve Tesich
Look if you like, but you will have to leap. — WH Auden
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs
and developing our wings on the way down. — Kurt Vonnegut
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as
your
headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. — EL Doctorow
A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth
rather than arguments. — Joyce Cary
Anybody can write a short story — a bad one, I mean — who has
industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to
write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills. The accepted
novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon
it in vain, and write not any more that he makes haste to blot.
Not so the beginner. Human nature has certain rigths; instinct
— the instinct of self-preservation — forbids that any man
(cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous
victory) should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil
beyond a period to be measured in weeks. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder.
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you;
figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you
have to offer. — Barbara Kingsolver
In a given scene I may know nothing more than how it's supposed to end,
most of the time not even that. Scenes are improvised. A character does or
says something, and with as much spontaneity and schizophrenia as I can
muster, another character responds. In this way, everything I write is
spontaneous chain reaction and I'm running around playing leapfrog in my
brain trying to "be" all my people. — Richard Price
No time for poetry but exactly what is. — Jack Kerouac
Time spent peddling an unfinished novel could be better spent finishing
it. — Margaret Reavey
First thought, best thought. — Allen Ginsberg
Third thought, best thought. — Frank Conroy
Get black on white. — Guy de Maupassant
By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the
vulgarity of speech or of gesture or memorable phrase of the mind itself.
He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with
extreme care (saving them for later use, that is), seeing that they
themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. —
James Joyce
Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and
then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I
only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand
years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go
sour. — Ernest Hemingway
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valéry
Only a mediocre writer is always at his best. — W Somerset Maugham
Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it,
one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it.
One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this
adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to
trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the
difficulty. — Guy de Maupassant, quoting Gustave Flaubert
Let us define plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events
arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the
emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died" is
a story. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. The
time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or
again: "The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it
was through grief at the death of the king." This is a plot with a mystery
in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence,
it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow.
Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say "and then?" If
it is in a plot we ask "why?" — EM Forster
I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to
keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell
the students to make their characters want something right away — even
if it’s only a glass of water. ... When you exclude plot, when you exclude
anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited
thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately
where the story is taking place, and who the people are. ... And you can
put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other. Students
like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid
confrontations in modern life. “Modern life is so lonely,” they say. This
is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the
characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and
entertain us all. — Kurt Vonnegut
This element of surprise or mystery — the detective element as it is
sometimes rather emptily called — is of great importance in a plot.
It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a
pocket in time, and it occurs crudely,
as in "Why did the queen die?" and more subtly in half-explained gestures
and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead. Mystery is
essential to plot, and cannot be appreciated without intelligence. ... To
appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind,
brooding, while the other part goes marching on. — EM Forster
Mystery is the basic element of all works of art. — Luis Buñuel
Sometimes a plot triumphs too completely.
The characters have to suspend their natures at every turn,
or else are so swept away by the course of Fate that our sense
of their reality is weakened. ... Hardy arranges events with emphasis
on causality, the ground plan is a plot, and the characters are ordered
to acquiesce in its requirements. ... In other words the characters have
been required to contribute too much to the plot. ... Nearly all novels
are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound
up. ... Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake now
have to contribute to the dnouement. ... logic takes over the command
from flesh and blood. If it was not for death and marriage I do not know
how the average novelist would conclude. Death and marriage are almost
his only connection between his characters and his plot. ... [T]he writer,
poor fellow, must be allowed to finish up somehow, he has his living to
get like anyone else, so no wonder that nothing is heard but hammering
and screwing. This — as far as one can generalize — is the
inherent defect
of novels: they go off at the end; and there are two explanations of it:
firstly, failure of pep, which threatens the novelist like all workers:
and secondly, the difficulty which we have been discussing: the characters
have been getting out of hand, laying foundations and declining to build
on them afterwards, and now the novelist has to labour personally, in
order that the job may be done to time. He pretends that the characters
are acting for him. He keeps mentioning their names and using inverted
commas. But the characters are gone or dead. — EM Forster
Fuck the plot. — Edna O'Brien
Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions.
Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement. —
Raymond Carver
Never confuse movement with action. — Ernest Hemingway
You should let dialogue get as nearly out of control as you can.
Characters should say what they say to each other instead of what they
mean to say. The worst purpose of dialogue is to elicit information: "You
know why we're out on this space station, Carruthers — to save the
universe!" — Robert Stone
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. — Muriel Rukeyser
Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another. — Elizabeth
Bowen
Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the
character has someplace to stand, something that can help define him,
something he can pick up and throw, if necessary, or eat, or give to his
girlfriend. Plot exists so the character can discover for himself (and in
the process reveal to the reader) what he, the character, is really like:
plot forces the character to choice and action, transforms him from a
static construct to a lifelike human being making choices and paying for
them or reaping the rewards. And theme exists only to make the character
stand up and be somebody: theme is elevated critical language for
what the character's main problem is. — John Gardner
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a
convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in
their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when
there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve
toward the round. The really flat character can be experessed in one
sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr Micawber." There is Mrs
Micawber — she says she won't desert Mr Micawber; she doesn't,
and there she is. — EM Forster
Let good people sin. Give virtue to rotters. — John L'Heureux
Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in
uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact & reason. — John Keats
The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very
thinly disguised. — John Fowles
That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the
improvised, the cheap, and the easy. — Henry James on the first-person
singular point-of-view
Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person
story. — William Kennedy
Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up
and down ladders in their own insides. — EM Forster
The meaning of being only becomes apparent in events. — Alvin Kernan
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. — William
Shakespeare
Plausibility is the morality of fiction. — Edith Mirrilees
The secret of successful fiction is a continual
slight novelty. — Edmund Gosse
Show, don't tell. — Henry James
You must render: never report. — Guy De Maupassant
The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the
fact that the author exists —
even of the fact he is reading a book. — Ford Madox Ford
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong
with it. — Randall Jarrell
My language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin. —
Karl Kraus
Any work of art must first of all tell a story. — Robert Frost
Good enough is never good enough. — AB Guthrie
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions
without systematic knowledge. — HG Wells
However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing
cannot be learned all at once. — Jean Jacques Rousseau
Nobody knows anything. — William Goldman on Hollywood
You write about the thing that sank its teeth into you and wouldn't let
go. — Paul West
You must get beyond divertissement, sketch, anecdote, the
interesting moment. You must get to the mystery of human personality.
What is the line of the story that leads us to a point where we see or
intuit something we haven't before? — John L'Heureux
We want someone to bring us the news. — William Gaddis
The furthest out is the only place to be. — Stanley Elkin
Tap into what you don't want to say. Tap into that secret place, despite the
agony, despite the personal pain, over and above the fatigue. — Arthur
Penn
The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to
emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function
that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement
for
some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most
violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust
that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation
must demand an exactly similar attitude. — Sigmund Freud
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some
sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things. — Virginia
Woolf
No tricks. — Raymond Carver
The more horses you yoke the quicker
everything will go — not the rending of
the block from its foundation, which is
impossible, but the snapping of the
traces and with that the gay and empty
journey. — Franz Kafka
The shot will go smoothly only when it takes the archer himself by
surprise. — Eugene Herrigel
When you describe the miserable and unfortunate,
and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder — that
seems to give a kind of background to another's grief,
against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your
story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. ... The more
objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you
make. — Anton Chekhov
You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and
revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at
intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives.
You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed,
by and by. — Mark Twain
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer,
no surprise for the reader. — Robert Frost
No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams
Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. ... It is
comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear
and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is
difficult to figure out and hard on the
brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium
height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had
already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently,
looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't
grasp all that at once, and art must be
grasped at once, instantaneously. — Anton Chekhov
A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be
too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.
Everything else — just tear that motherfucker apart. — Richard
Price
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and the lightning bug. — Mark Twain
Is the story developing an attitude or victimized by it. — Leonard
Michaels
There's hardly anywhere in literature where you don't find a
triangle. — Leonard Michaels
Literal transcriptions of tape-recorded speech
may be accurate in the legal sense, but they are curiously lifeless.
Shorn of gesture, emphasis, timbre and cadence, they are the empty
husks of what was once a real conversation. Often, they make their
speakers sound completely half-witted. What was said with an ironic
twist of the voice now reads as a solemn pontification; what was said
with intense seriousness comes out as a passing aside. Read almost
any newspaper interview, and you'll conclude that the dialogue of real
people is more stilted and implausible than the dialogue of invented
characters. Trying to make real people sound real on the page is
necessarily an exercise in impressionism. Nothing teaches one the
subtleties of punctuation so well as an attempt to take a skein of actual
speech and restore to it the pauses, ellipses, switches of tone and speed,
that it had in life. Lumbered with a rough and ready supply of dots,
dashes and stops, you ache for a system of musical notation: if only
this word could be written as a semi-quaver ascending,
on a series of rising
notes to that word,
a breve. ... You isolate the speaker's tics and tricks of speech, his
keywords,
and make him say them slightly more often than he did in fact; you give
him small bits of stage business to mark his silences; you invent lines of
dialogue for yourself to break up a paragraph of solid talk that looks too
long to be believable. You are trespassing, perhaps, into writing fiction,
but the fiction will still be truer to the man and to the occasion than the
literal transcription. — Jonathan Raban
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game
of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the
putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than
anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own
improvements. — Ernest Hemingway,
The prose as such has to be singing the song the story is
telling. — Leonard Michaels
There's something about a parenthesis in fiction that puts one off,
saying, "It's me, moi, jumping in now. — John L'Heureux
Using language like jungle growth isn't the solution to telling a
story. — John L'Heureux
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as
possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and
billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to
show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the
regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
— Ernest Hemingway
Improvisation is a great mystery.
You play something, and you play an answer to it.
Then you play something to wrap it up.
Nothing is going through your mind; you're not thinking of anything.
Every now and then you surprise yourself.
Where did that come from? — Jimmy Knepper
Write from what you know into what you don't know. —
Grace Paley
Nothing on earth in fiction is less interesting than characters under the
influence of alcohol. — John L'Heureux
My eyes glaze over at a writer solving tiny problems. — Doris Grumbach
Simplify. Then complicate all over again. — Paul West
I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon
to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people
who live by the philosophies of popular songs. — Zelda Fitzgerald
Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
— Carlos Fuentes
"I love you," said Brenda Ueland to Brenda Ueland.
"I love you, too," Brenda answered shyly, with a sincere look in her
fine, strong face. — Brenda Ueland
Sometimes language gets in the way of the story's feelings. The reader
finds himself experiencing the language of the story rather than the
story. The words sit there on the page like coins, with their own opacity,
as though they're there for their own sake. "A man goes into a phone
booth, stirring coins in his palm." "Stirring" is such an obviously
selected word. You can feel the writer looking for the word as he sat at
the typewriter. — Leonard Michaels
Plot does not simply move with time, but spreads out conceptually in
metaphorical space. — John L'Heureux
Self-confidence can be crippling. — Leonard Michaels
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But
there are older and simpler a nd better words, and those are the ones I
use. — Ernest Hemingway
Short words are best and the old
words when short are best of all. — Winston Churchill
Language is a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes to make the bears
dance, when what we long for is to move the stars to pity — Gustave
Flaubert
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