How To Write Like Joan Didion

Just finished ‘The Year of Magical Thinking,’ Ms. Didion’s memoir about the year following her husband’s death. Should writers crafting memoirs read this, I encourage them to read that.

• For every long sentence, you have to drop an anchor and slow down the pace.
• In the same vein, build up a certain tone, then knock it down.
• Everyone sees themselves as heroes in their own story.
• The first and last sentences of a paragraph are paramount.More tips from Joan Didion

• 1. “Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”
• 2. “Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one.”
• 3. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
• 4. “The impulse to write things down is a particularly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.”
• 5. “It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”
• 6. “Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.”
• 7. “All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.”
• 8. “As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs… The way I write is who I am, or have become…”
• 9. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
• 10. “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.”
• 11. “I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.”

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