“…concision is precision…”

and

“Let some stuff that you think is interesting drop away.”

->exc’ed frum Davey Robbins on bksp.org

The writers who go the distance, he insisted, have a distinct subject matter, a particular approach that sets them apart from everyone else. The mere mention of their names, Faulkner, for example, or Edith Wharton, conjures themes, settings, methods, tones, and attitudes that are unique to them.

How did they get to be so distinctive? By responding to who they were and the forces that made them that way.

Backspace– The Writer’s Place

The truth is that, in the United States, maybe as few as two hundred writers of prose fiction make a living at it. Every Thursday, in USA Today’s entertainment section, there’s a list of the top fifty bestselling books. Non-fiction is grouped with fiction, hardbacks with paperbacks. Fifty books. A longer list of 150 books is available on that newspaper’s Internet site. The lowest book might have sold only a thousand copies nationwide. Seen from this perspective, the figure of two hundred fiction writers who make a living at it seems huge. A couple of years ago, I came across an article somewhere that said the average income for a fiction writer in the U.S. was $6,500. I believe it. The unescapable moral, I tell my students, is that anyone who wants to become a writer had better not give up his or her day job.

from Backspace– The Writer’s Place