Thursday, July 6, 2023

5 Quotes by Edward Albee to Make You a Better Writer

Edward Albee

5 Quotes by Edward Albee to Make You a Better Writer

The playwright of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf left us incredibly wise insight about writing

Brian Rowe

October 17, 2019

Edward Albee (1928–2016) was a world-renowned playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. His most famous work is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but he’s also well-known for The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, and A Delicate Balance.

Here are five quotes he said over the years that will help your writing immensely!

1. I am convinced that no one is fully educated without a full grounding in the arts.

A friend of mine has said to me on more than one occasion that the one thing he absolutely hated about college was having to take classes that had nothing to do with his major. To him, any classes he was forced to take that didn’t in some way relate to business was a waste of time. He wanted to take only classes during those four years that worked toward his major, and he thinks this should be the case for every student at every college out there.

As you might be able to guess, I couldn’t disagree with him more. Even if you’re 100% sure of your career path, you should still absolutely take classes in college of various disciplines. And you should absolutely take classes in the arts. I think everyone in his or her lifetime should take a theater class, a painting class, a fiction writing class, a poetry writing class. Because Albee is right: a full grounding in the arts makes you fully educated.

The arts make you more empathetic toward others. The arts open you up to new experiences. The arts allow you to express yourself in ways you never thought were possible.

The arts give you the tools you need as a person to be successful in whatever profession you eventually go into!

2. The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

This quote makes me laugh. Obviously he’s not being literal here. And obviously he can’t hate the critics that much since so much of his work was heralded by critics the world over, most especially Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

What Albee is saying in this quote is that you should always be writing for an audience, never critics. You should be writing for that reader out there who’s desperate to find a book like yours.

If you sit down at your desk every day fixated on writing a novel for the critics, for awards, for prizes, your work is already as good as dead. You can’t think that way ever. You’ll never be able to please all the critics out there no matter how hard you try. You shouldn’t even necessarily think about your potential audience of readers either.

What you should be doing, at least when you write the first draft of a novel, is write it not for critics, not for the public, but for yourself. Tell yourself the story in a way that delights you, fascinates you, makes you smile and cry and laugh and gasp.

If you write your book this way, then most likely the readers and the critics will all delight in reading your work.

3. Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theater. But, whatever happens, I am grateful to have had my novice work received so well, and so quickly.

I’ve written a lot on here about how must patience and resilience and hard work goes into a career in writing. You might be one of the lucky ones that gets his or her first novel published in your twenties. Or you might need to write three or four books before you sign with a literary agent and have something published.

Or you might be like me, twenty novels into my career, a literary agent and a book on submission, but no publishing deal yet.

The truth of the matter is that careers in writing do begin mysteriously. Sometimes you write the right idea at the right time, and your career takes off rather quickly, the way Edward Albee’s did. Or it can take years and years to find success. There are those that skyrocket early, but then their careers fizzle after awhile. And of course there are those like Stephen King whose career keeps going strong decade after decade.

The key is to always love what you do. To work hard when your writing is successful and when your writing is not successful. To believe in yourself no matter what and to keep trying new things, keep experimenting, try to improve in your work as the years go by. It’s all you can do, really.

4. Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

When you write fiction, you’re making things up. In sentence after sentence you’re providing a made-up world, made-up people, a made-up premise.

Bad writers in a sense treat fiction as fake, as a lie. Good writers, on the other hand, turn fiction into a beautiful reality to every lucky person who picks up his or her book. The reality in the work of good writers becomes truth in every sense, never a lie.

One of my favorite quotes from the Alexander Payne movie Sideways is at the beginning when a man says something like, “I prefer to read non-fiction. Reading stories that are just made up? Waste of time.”

You see, the thing is this: fiction is a waste of time if the writer isn’t defining the reality of his world, if the writer isn’t turning the facts of his world and characters into truth.

When you’re writing, you need to believe everything about your story and ultimately deliver that experience to your reader as well.

5. The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

There are thousands of books out there about writing. You can study each of those books front and back before you ever put a word down. You can get an MFA in Creative Writing where you study the craft of writing with great professors and fellow students for years on end.

On the other hand you can do away with books on writing and graduate school and just write, write, write. Try different genres. Try different mediums of writing. Devote six months to a novel that you then query to a hundred literary agents.

You can daydream about your stories, write about your stories, outline, cluster, brainstorm. Or you can do a mix of all of these, like I have!

At the end of the day, Albee is absolutely right: the thing that makes a person creative is to be creative, and that’s all there is to it. Being creative and staying creative is the key to a successful life in the arts. Hell, it’s the key to a successful life.

So be creative in a way that speaks to you, that fills your soul with joy each and every day. That’s truly all there is to it!

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Brian Rowe is an author, teacher, book devotee, and film fanatic. He received his MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from the University of Nevada, Reno, and his BA in Film Production from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He writes young adult and middle grade suspense novels, and is represented by Kortney Price of the Corvisiero Agency.

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