Advice to Nonfiction Writers

from My Twice-Lived Life by Donald M. Murray

(New York: Ballantine, 2001)

            The terror of the blank page must be there. Whatever your work, I think you need the contradictory feelings of terror and confidence. . . . Each morning I come to my writing desk with the same contradictory feelings: I am fearful I will not be able to write well enough; I am also confident that I will be able to write well enough. Without the real terror, it would not be worth the effort; without the confidence, it would not be possible. (76)

            Those of us who love our work and refuse to give it up as we age experience a continual learning. We learn the tricks of the trade and then we have to unlearn them. We can be the prisoner of competence and so we have to keep challenging our craft. (76)

            Those of us who love our work find it filled with surprise. There is always the unexpected. I write what I do not know I knew. This is the secret of the artist: We do not know what we are doing until it is done. Seventy-five or twenty-five, our craft takes us beyond plans, goals, expectations. We fail and the failures are instructive. We write what we do not mean to write and find a meaning greater than we could have dreamt. (77-78)

The more you write, the more there is to draw from; the more you say, the more there is to say. The deeper you go into your imagination, the richer than reservoir becomes. You do not run out of material by using all that’s in you; rather, when you take everything that is available one day, it only makes room for new things to appear the next. . . . You don’t need to know a whole book in order to write the first page. You don’t even need to know the end of the first page. You need only the desire to create something that will say what you feel needs to be said, however vague its form at the beginning. You need a willingness to discover the wealth and wisdom of your own subconscious, and to trust that it will tell you what to do and how to do it—not all at once, but as needed, step by step. You have to take a deep breath, let go of your usual control, and then begin walking in the dark.

Elizabeth Berg. Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True.
New York: HarperCollins, 1999), quoted in Murray, 34-35.

from Miller, Matthew. “An Interview with James Galvin.” The Writer’s Chronicle. September 2003: 33-38.

            All writing, probably all art, all invention, involves improvisation. . . . Writing . . . invites erasure and reformulation. It exists in a different kind of time. You can take it back or make it closer to what you want, even if what you want is more raw, so why repudiate that? Being deliberate, we know from reading, doesn’t have to interfere with the texture of spontaneity.

            I don’t believe in method so much as I believe in technique. That is, each poem or prose work should find its own method, which is the result of technique. And technique, I’m guessing, is the result of reading well. Form and surface are the results of the way one feels about what one is saying.

            Shape, I think, should be only provisionally predetermined, and determined to change according to the unpredictable necessities of truth-telling. (33)

            I don’t think writing has to be responsible to anything but honesty, an attempt at truth-telling. (36)

from Sheryl St. Germain, Letter to the Editor, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 28, 2003, B18.

At the end of the day, all we really have in this life are the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives, and about others. Whether our stories are imagined or drawn directly from our lives doesn't matter: These are stories that say we mattered, learned something during our short tenure on the planet, and here's a little bit of it.