14 writers offer some extensive insights into their work and the writer’s life. Here are some of the stand-out points:
Elmore Leonard:
Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you [...]

US author J.D. Salinger who died last week, aged 91 will be remembered for many things, though possibly not by the number of his (published) works:
Since Jerome David Salinger’s death on Wednesday, at the house in New Hampshire that served as his home and self-imposed prison, the torrent of words about the writer’s long, [...]

What a person’s favourite authors can reveal of their personality.
Richard Dawkins: People who have their significant other grab them under the table in order to shut them up whenever someone else at a dinner says something absolutely ridiculous and wrong.

The confessions of a semi-successful author by “Jane Austen Doe”…
Never an enthusiastic employee, I quit my job at age 35 to become a full-time writer, to live life on my own terms. After publishing four books – each of them critically acclaimed, several of them award-winners, none of them big enough sellers to [...]

There are still some authors who prefer to use typewriters – rather than computers – when writing.
“I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter,” he told one interviewer. “The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape. It’s an aesthetic [...]

It seems no two authors adhere to the same writing or composing methods…
Booker-prize winner Michael Ondaatje’s preferred medium is 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks. He completes the first three or four drafts by hand, sometimes literally cutting and pasting passages and whole chapters with scissors and tape. Some of his notebooks have pages with [...]

In other words another way of saying “just do it”.
Talent is overrated. Luck is overrated. The right agent is overrated. It helps to have all three, but they are all worthless without that thing in your hand, the manuscript, the thing in your hand that may become a book for which trees will die [...]

Electronic publishing is gradually turning us all into authors – and given enough time – everyone will have a book title to their name.
By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people [...]

I’m not a science fiction writer so I doubt I’d be role-playing as if I were Luke Skywalker were I involved in a car crash. Quite possibly nor would too many actual science fiction authors either.
Miller says her first thought during a car accident during her university years wasn’t of whether she could die [...]

61 essential postmodern reads: but now to answer the question, how exactly do you decide what is a postmodern book?
The thing about postmodernism is it’s impossible to pin down exactly what might make a book postmodern. In looking at the attributes of the essential postmodern reads, we found some were downright contradictory. Postmodern books have [...]