"Egan says that it took a year to "control and calibrate" the story she's now tweeting; her tight prose doesn't exactly invite replies. But the shift into Twitter is a truly modern serialization technique; there's more going on here than simply contemporary fiction meted out 140 characters at a time."

"But critics, let yourselves go. Dunham has Hannah’s back. Hannah doesn’t need our motherly concern, our chivalrous evocation of the women’s lib barricades. As we have already learned from the pilot episode, Hannah is smart and perceptive and funny and not (usually) a total doormat—she just hasn’t figured out where she herself would like a sex scene such as this to go."

"For Christ sake write and don't worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live. All write but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material (as we say at Yale)."

"So I don’t know how the brain makes stories, but it must have to do with deep memories or deep symbols. Certainly when I was writing The Middle Stories there was no conscious deliberation — it was just one sentence following rather quickly on the heels of the previous sentence. I was trying to write as quickly as possible at the time, like to make myself into a kind of writing machine, where I was at once very alert and very exact, trying to write these stories that would come out perfectly, and which I wouldn’t have to edit. So I was training myself to do what felt right in each moment. In some way, it felt like dancing. There’s brain-thought when you’re dancing, but mostly it’s in your body — your body decides your next move. In the case of writing, I think it’s as much in the fingers as in the head. Maybe the fingers get you deeper than the brain does."

"This interview with Kurt Vonnegut was originally a composite of four interviews done with the author over the past decade. The composite has gone through an extensive working over by the subject himself, who looks upon his own spoken words on the page with considerable misgivings . . . indeed, what follows can be considered an interview conducted with himself, by himself."

"We find ourselves not by turning inward toward what we imagine is inside us, but by the act of looking outward at the world. The self is nothing without what it looks at. On its own, it’s inert. Kick it. Poke it. It seems dead. But point it at something else — Doritos, lawn darts, abandoned mines in Upper Michigan, a cappella groups, Dungeons & Dragons — and it perks up. Thus a focus on our obsessions, however nerdy, creepy, lovely, allows the self to emerge and live and blink a little in the bright light. In other words, the best way to write about ourselves is to write about something specific in the world. We don’t write about ourselves. We write ourselves."

"During the nine months of 1951 that saw him working on his novel, East of Eden, author John Steinbeck began each day of writing by penning, in his notebook, a brief letter to his editor and good friend, Pascal "Pat" Covici. Early-1952, with the book finished, Steinbeck wrote him a final letter — a dedication to Covici in which he spoke of the frustrations and insecurities faced by an author during such a process. It can be read below."

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

But where fixity enabled us to become better readers, can iteration make us better writers? If a text is never finished, does it demand our contribution? Fixity is important if you deem the text the end; but perhaps instead the text is now a means—to our own writing, our own thinking.

British-born David Ogilvy was one of the original, and greatest, "ad men." In 1948, he started what would eventually be known as Ogilvy & Mather, the Manhattan-based advertising agency that has since been responsible for some of the world's most iconic ad campaigns, and in 1963 he even wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man, the best-selling book that is still to this day considered essential reading for all who enter the industry. Time magazine called him "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry" in the early-'60s; his name, and that of his agency, have been mentioned more than once in Mad Men for good reason.