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Nora Ephron died yesterday at 71.

In her career, she worked as a journalist before reinventing the modern romantic comedy (Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally) while writing everything from novels and essays to stage plays.

WD is saddened by her passing, and our thoughts go out to her sister Hallie (who we have worked with over the years) and the rest of the Ephron family.

Here, in Nora’s honor, are some of her words from an interview we did way back in 1974—when she was 32 and a successful freelancer, before all the Hollywood success that was to come.

Here’s how writer Rex Reed described her work back then: “Great, chunky spoonfuls served in tasty style by a fresh, inventive observer who stalks the phonies and cherubs alike, sniffing them out like a hungry tiger, clamping her pretty teeth down in all spots where it hurts the most, then leaving all of her victims better off than they were before they met Nora Ephron.”

 *

“Well, it’s just that my point of view happens to be faintly cynical or humorous—and just the way I see things and that’s how it comes out when I write it.

“You better make them care about what you think. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. Otherwise it doesn’t work. I mean we’ve all read pieces where we thought, Oh, who gives a damn.”

When asked about writer’s block, and what happens when she’s completely cold and stuck on a piece—
“I am never completely cold. I don’t have writer’s block really. I do have times when I can’t get the lead and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. I don’t write a word of the article until I have the lead. It just sets the whole tone—the whole point of view. I know exactly where I am going as soon as I have the lead. … But as for being cold—as a newspaper reporter you learn that no one tolerates you if you are cold. It’s one thing you are not allowed to be. It’s not professional. You have to turn the story in. There is no room for the artist.”

“I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about—and I think there are some writers who do that—but that hasn’t happened to me. I do think it’s dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.”

When asked about her writing routine—
“I don’t have much of a routine. I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don’t do anything. I just sort of have lunch—all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.”

When asked what her main distraction was—
“Life. I mean the main thing that distracts me is the pressure to go on with one’s life. That you have to stop to have lunch with someone or you have to take the cat to the vet …”

Her advice to young writers—
“First of all, whatever you do, work in a field that has something to do with writing or publishing. So you will be exposed to what people are writing about and how they are writing, and as important, so you will be exposed to people in the business who will get to know you and will call on you if they are looking for someone for a job.

“Secondly, you have to write. And if you don’t have a job doing it, then you have to sit at home doing it.”

*Special thanks to Dylan McCartney for his help on this post.

A good writing  quote can give me goosebumps.

For those days when the well is feeling dry and a tad echo-y, I keep a running list of my favorite quotes—things I’ve read, things I’ve edited, things I’ve found in the WD archives, things people have said to me in interviews.

Such tiny, perfect revelations.

A couple of years ago, I posted a portion of this list on my old WD blog. Recently, someone asked if I was still collecting quotes.

Here’s the latest iteration of the list. (I’d love to expand it, too—please share some of your favorites in the Comments section of this blog post.)

Happy Friday, and happy writing.

                                                           *

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
—Philip Roth

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
—Stephen King

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
—William S. Burroughs

“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
—Steve Almond, WD

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell

“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
—Hunter S. Thompson

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
—George Orwell

“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”
—Roald Dahl, WD

“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
—Robert Benchley

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
—Virginia Woolf

“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.”
—Stephen King, WD

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
—Peter Handke

“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”
—William Zinsser, WD

“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
—William Faulkner

“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare ha

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I’m going to go ahead and toss the illusion of journalistic objectivity out the window for a second, and put this on the table: I love ThrillerFest.

We sponsor it every year, and in 2011 I attended for the first time. I was blown away. There are craft sessions taught by bestselling writers. Lively panels. A pitch slam. Some of the most fun cocktail parties in publishing (I was reduced to a giggling teenager when I saw Margaret Atwood wandering around).

Perhaps the best part: Everyone is approachable, from the debut authors to the heavy hitters.

This year, ThrillerFest is July 11-14 in New York. Of the dozens and dozens of authors on hand, Jack Higgins, R.L. Stine, Lee Child, Catherine Coulter, John Sandford, Ann Rule, Richard North Patterson and Karin Slaughter will be there.

And here’s the scoop on how you can be part of it. Executive director Kimberley Howe is giving one WD reader a Day Pass for Friday, July 13—one of the best days of the conference. The pass includes full access to all ThrillerFest programming for the day, as well as a ticket to the Love is Murder cocktail party that celebrates the release of the International Thriller Writers’ third anthology.

Event programming runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and includes spotlight interviews with Lee Child and Catherine Coulter. Former FBI and counterterrorism expert David Major will also share his tales from his days at the White House.

… So how do you win the pass? Easy enough.

In the comments section below, just tell us who your favorite thriller writer is by 2 p.m. next Friday. We’ll put all the names of the commenters into a hat and randomly draw one winner. We’ll announce the winner Monday, July 19.

Good luck! Hope to see you there.

For more on ThrillerFest, visit thrillerfest.com.

Now, back to being objective and such.

Zachary Petit is an award-winning journalist, the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine, and the co-author of A Year of Writing Prompts: 366 Story Ideas for Honing Your Craft and Eliminating Writer’s Block.

Like what you read from WD online? Don’t miss an issue in print!

A couple of months back, I had the pleasure of talking writing over a Guinness with Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, Townie, and other books.

Our profile of Dubus in WD magazine is on its way to subscribers right now, and will hit newsstands June 5. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite unpublished excerpts from the interview—those inspirational writing bits that wouldn’t fit neatly into the piece, and deserve better than to be lost in the jumble of notebooks on my desk.

I’ve also got a new copy of Dubus’ memoir Townie on hand—I’ll give it to one randomly drawn commenter on this post below.

Happy Friday. Here’s Dubus on how to stay true to yourself and your work, and some other tips.

* * *

“If you don’t put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There’s the writer and there’s the author. The author—you don’t ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care—easier said than done. Accept that the world may never notice this thing you worked so hard at. And instead, do it for it, find a job, find a way of living that gives you an hour or two or three a day to do it, and then work your ass off sending out, trying to get out there, but do not put the pressure on the work to do something for you. Because then you’re going to be writing dishonestly and for the market instead of for the characters and your story.”

“There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel—it’s that postmodern thing—it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being’s experience.”

“I really think that if there’s any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you’re doing, you’re not doing it as well as you can. Don’t think about publishing, don’t think about editors, don’t think about marketplace.”

“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”

“One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.”

“I still have my truck, and I still have my carpentry tools, and if this writing thing dries up on a publishing level—it’s never gonna dry up for me on an artistic level because I’m never going to quit—but if all the sudden I were out in the cold in the publishing world, them I’m gonna build you a kitchen. I’m gonna do your roof. I would rather do that than sell my soul to the publishing devil. I just won’t do it.”

“I think it’s important not to talk about what you’re working on. … It releases that creative tension that can be fuel for your writing. Don’t show anyone what you’re working on. Don’t talk about it. And don’t think about it. Don’t be taking all these furious notes because I think that when we take all these notes when we’re not writing, they’re actually sexy ideas that may be just ideas. If it’s a real direction for the story, it’s gonna show up in the next day anyway. So just push it back.”

“Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.”

 

Every week, I spelunk into the Writer’s Digest archives to find the wisest, funniest, or downright strangest moments from our 92 years of publication.

About 10 years ago, lawyer-turned-novelist John Grisham spilled the beans in Newsweek that a 1973 Writer’s Digest article paved the way for him to write his bestseller The Firm.

Naturally, we’ve been geeking out about this since we first heard it, and see it referenced every so often in relation to Grisham books, but I’d never actually read the piece. So I dug it up today—it’s by author Brian Garfield, and was originally titled “10 Rules for Suspense Fiction.”

In case the next Grisham is out there reading this, I’ll include Garfield’s 10 points below, and will also link to the full article (which is reproduced over at the International Thriller Writers website).

Happy Friday!

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The 10 Commandments of How to Write a Thriller

1. Start with action; explain it later.
    
2. Make it tough for your protagonist.
    
3. Plant it early; pay it off later.
    
4. Give the protagonist the initiative.
    
5. Give the protagonist a personal stake.
    
6. Give the protagonist a tight time limit, and then shorten it.
    
7. Choose your character according to your own capacities, as well as his.
    
8. Know your destination before you set out.
    
9. Don’t rush in where angels fear to tread.
10. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want to read.

For the full piece, “10 Rules for Suspense Fiction” by Brian Garfield, click here.

–

 
Zachary Petit is an award-winning journalist, the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine, and the co-author of A Year of Writing Prompts: 366 Story Ideas for Honing Your Craft and Eliminating Writer’s Block.

Like what you read from WD online? Don’t miss an issue in print!

Every week, I spelunk into the Writer’s Digest archives to find the wisest, funniest, or downright strangest moments from our 92 years of publication.

Today: Here’s to Janet Evanovich (and that we all might one day hit it as big as Janet Evanovich). The author of the bestselling Stephanie Plum series celebrates her birthday this Sunday, so I did some rooting around, and found our most recent interview with her. It’s from 2007, and you can read the full thing here.

As someone who begins to nod off at the thought of making giant, classic outlines (and instead prefers free-range, perhaps dangerously vague stream-of-consciousness explorations), I was intrigued by Evanovich’s more simplified “storyboard” process.

Here’s how to outline like Janet Evanovich—plus a frank, honest example of what some of it looks like, from one of her actual storyboards.

Evanovich: Storyboarding is a little more visual. When I’m plotting out a book, I use a storyboard—I’ll have maybe three lines across on the storyboard and just start working through the plot line. I always know where relationships will go, and how the book is going to end. When I storyboard, they’re just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard. Another board I keep is an action timeline. It’s a way of quickly referring to what happened a couple of scenes ago. The boards cover my office walls.

WD: IT’S MORE SCENE-ORIENTED THAN AN OUTLINE MIGHT BE, THEN?

Evanovich: Exactly. Because I know the relationships, and I already know my characters and how I’m going to reveal my characters to my readers—how I’m going to feed them information about that character. That stuff doesn’t have to be in my outline. What I have to outline is action and plot because I’m not particularly good at that.

Do you outline? How in depth do you go? Share your thoughts in the comments section. I’m building up another dangerously tall stack of review copies at my desk, and will pull the name of one random commenter next week to receive a few cool new writing  books.

Happy Friday.

(Also, some preliminary blog procrastination today has led me to discover how good Evanovich’s website is. Not a bad thing to check out if you’re looking to sharpen or start your own.)

–

Like what you read from WD online? Don’t miss an issue in print!

From hardboiled detectives to murderers, leprechauns, spies and even giraffe narrators, when it comes to the diverse and unique entries in our free Your Story contest, the gang’s all here.

If you have a spare moment this weekend for a writing challenge, take five minutes and give it a whirl.

Basically, in every issue we give our readers a chance to get published in Writer’s Digest by running a prompt and asking them to do one of two things in response to it: Write a full short story, or write a one-sentence opener to a short story.

For our March/April 2012 issue, we invited our readers to go the one-sentence route for this writing prompt:

Write the first line to a story incorporating these three words: Cinderella, midnight, and behave.

Want in? Post your entry in the Comments section of this post, and it’ll automatically be entered in the competition.

The rules:

• Your sentence (just one!) must be 25 words or fewer. Entries of 26 words will be DQ’d (even though it’s my lucky number).
• The deadline is April 10, 2012.
• One entry per person, please.
• How it all works: We’ll select the top 10 entries and post them here. In mid-April, readers will vote for their favorites to help rank the winners.
• This is a free writing competition. The prize is publication in WD.
• You can also submit your sentence via the form here.
• Finally, as we say about this publication contest in the magazine: “You can be funny, poignant, witty, etc. It is, after all, your story.”

Good luck! One of the most fun things we get to do around here every issue is read them all, and we appreciate every single word that comes in.

I’ll be back next Friday with my series on vintage discoveries from the WD archives—and some free books. Stay tuned.

(And if you landed here looking for general advice on submitting short fiction to publications, check out my colleague Scott Francis’ excellent post on 10 rules for submitting short stories.)

Happy Friday.

Pinocchio, off to the clink

If you’ve been keeping up with the publishing world this week, you’ve no doubt heard the mysterious story that’s been dominating it: Someone sent 11 pounds of marijuana to a fake recipient at St. Martin’s Press in New York. The feds intercepted it. (For the story that spawned the #PotLit hashtag, click here.)

Who was the shipment supposed to go to?

Was it bound for a wayward editor? A disgruntled assistant? A desperate intern?

No. It was probably on its way to one of parent company Macmillan’s characters who think they can get away with anything. Specifically, someone from the Tor Classics line, which is run out of the Flatiron Building with St. Martin’s.

Here, in our estimation, are the most likely suspects:

Ebenezer Scrooge, of A Christmas Carol fame: There’s a reason a curmudgeon would get really, really slaphappy, introspective and nice for a day. (Not to mention see ghosts.)

Dracula: This guy has always been up to no good, and everyone has known it for a long time. Plus, he’s insanely old, and has glaucoma. And we know what insanely old vampires use to treat their glaucoma.

Dude! Rip!

Ahab, of Moby-Dick fame: He believes it helps with his OCD. Fair to say however that this could also be the root of his more irrational escapades.

Rip Van Winkle: How else do you think he slept for 20 years? (When he awoke, he was pleased to discover that cheese puffs and Nutella had been invented in the interim.)

Tom Sawyer: Fairly obvious. Forever a rapscallion.

Everyone in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Notably the bong-smoking caterpillar.

Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde: Posterboy for the perils of drug use.

Everyone in The Wizard of Oz: See Everyone in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, replace “caterpillar” with anyone and everyone obsessed with wizards.

Billy Budd, From Melville’s Billy Budd: Forever upset about being overlooked and trumped by albino whales and gentlemen with one leg, Billy Budd developed unsavory coping mechanisms.

"I'm a free spirit."

Frankenstein: Because of the daddy issues.

Pinocchio: Geppetto knew he should have been more concerned with his creation’s red eyes than his elongated nose and strong urges to talk to insects.

Oliver Twist: See Tom Sawyer. Also explains why he kept asking Mr. Bumble for more food.

(Are we overlooking someone? Which fictional character do you

Every week, I spelunk into the Writer’s Digest archives to find the wisest, funniest, or downright strangest moments from our 92 years of publication.

Today: A vintage article and quotes from Jack Kerouac (On the Road), who in January 1962 wrote a piece for WD asking, Are Writers Made or Born? (This week would have marked Kerouac’s 90th birthday. And, if you’re an On the Road fan, a new trailer is out for the upcoming film.)

I’ll include a smattering of highlights from the article below.

The question is always a matter of debate among writers, and Kerouac makes some (unsurprisingly) bold statements. What do you think: Are writers born or made?

Happy Friday!

“There can be no major writer without original genius. Artists of genius, like Jackson Pollock, have painted things that have never been seen before.”

“Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through—originality.”

“Five thousand university-trained writers could put their hand to a day in June in Dublin in 1904, or one night’s dreams, and never do with it what Joyce did with it: He was simply born to do it. On the other hand, if the five thousand ‘trained’ writers, plus Joyce, all put their hands to a Reader’s Digest-type article about ‘Vacation Hints’ or ‘Homemaker’s Tips,’ even then I think Joyce would stand out because of his inborn originality of language insight.”

“Anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just ‘talents.’ Hemingway later invented his own form also. The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar.”

“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.”

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

 

For more quotes and wisdoms from other legendary scribes, read our 90-year retrospective here.

WD is also having a giant warehouse sale through March 18. Check out the discounts on books, magazines and other products here.

Every week, I spelunk into the Writer’s Digest archives to find the wisest, funniest, or downright strangest moments from our 92 years of publication. Today: An array of quotes from the brilliant … Read more

At Writer’s Digest, one of my favorite things to do is to go spelunking in the magazine archives. First published in 1920 as Successful Writing, WD has been around for 92 years, which gives a motivated nerd a lot of thrills in digging around when he’s not editing, writing or having mini panic attacks about production deadlines. Read more