A few short excerpts:

You should certainly strive to make your reader see what you see; the trick is in finding details that allow for an accurate vision. Learn to include only the details that matter. — Monica Wood

Cut the puppet strings and let your characters behave. Like an actor working to grasp a part, you as a writer may have to be terribly explicit and exhaustive about your characters’ motives and feelings until you understand them well enough that their actions look like and mean what you want them to with no explication whatever. Once you do understand, eliminate all trace of your method-acting warm-up exercises. What’s left will be pretty close to pure, eloquent behavior. — Joyce Thompson

"Food" is an idea; "black-bean soup" is a thing. Naming not only makes the writing more visceral, it makes the reader trust you. — David Long

Do mention if you’re in a creative-writing program, as this shows you are studying the craft of writing. But don’t despair if you’re a self-taught writer; ultimately, the story will show how serious you are about your work. — George Clark, item #3 from his 20 dos and don’ts on cover letters.

You can’t rush the work itself, or your progress as a writer. Each story you finish, however successful or unsuccessful, will make way for the next one, and so on, until one day you write something publishable So in terms of the writing itself, write from the heart, inspire yourself with the work of writers you admire, and embrace the revision process. — Melanie Bishop

I have to get up at 3:00 A.M. sometimes, just to save the part of me that doesn’t make sense. — Kathleen Tyau

Sometimes you feel like you’re the only human being in the whole world whose existence is totally unjustified... — Jonathan Raban, interviewed by Michael Upchurch

It’s impossible for me to imagine a life without writing. It’s what I do and who I am. — Sigrid Nunez

Issue #1 WA1$6.00