Writing advice by famous authors

Famous writers reveal and explain elements of their craft.

I don’t actually compose in longhand. I lie back in a long chair and make notes, you know, bits of dialogue and then another bit of description. You see, I don’t try to make it continuous. Then I work at the typewriter. I find one system that works very well with me is to sit at the typewriter and have a pad on my desk, on which I write out the next bit of the story, maybe a bit of dialogue or description by hand, and then transfer it to the machine. But I make several drafts. The stuff I do on the typewriter isn’t the final version. I mess it about a lot with ink, and put in bits and alter adjectives and things, and then make a fair copy of it. The great thing I like working on the typewriter. It rather inspires me.
P.G.Wodehouse, 1971

I start with a concept that outrages me, something that bothers the hell out of me. I think arresting fiction is written out of a sense of outrage. I try to find something with an underpinning of reality. I generally go back over recent history looking for a situation where the events have a conceivable official explanation but where the solution might be other than it is purported to be.
Robert Ludlum, 1977

You should spend thirty minutes a day thinking about sex. The purpose of this is to get yourself sexually excited, which builds tremendous amounts of energy and then carry that into your work. Get yourself in that extreme state of being next to madness. Keep yourself in, not necessarily a frenzied state, but in a state of great intensity. The kind of state you would be in before going to bed with your partner. That heightened state when you are in a carnal embrace: Time stops and nothing else matters. You should always writer with an erection. Even if you are a woman.
Tom Robbins, 1988

I had no time to write –zero time. But I figured I could make time if I could carve out little segments. I knew it would be a slow process, but I didn’t care because I was in no hurry. I learned two very valuable lessons in doing that. One, you can’t get in a hurry. Two, write every day if you want to see your novel completed. My goal was to write a page a day. Some days I could only find thirty minutes, some days two hours. Sometime I would write five or six pages, sometimes, just one. But writing every single day is of utmost importance. Especially like most beginning writers, you have another full-time job.
John Grisham 1993.
(More to come….)