Quotes Tagged "writing"

You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.

Destroy your life; then put it back together.You'll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and – side benefit – the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and range with the people you create on the page – or run into off of it.

Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.

...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.

Reading feeds the soul, writing nourishes it!

I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer.

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that’s going to happen is if you actually do it. People can’t read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page. So you have to do it, goddamnit.

You can only write what you know if you've lived, otherwise, you'll just be writing words.

But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.

I don't write stories, I write characters.

Ending a series is a difficult one .......where should a story that you have followed for so long end? When do you step away from the characters and let the readers decide their fate from there? When they can stand on their own is my only answer for that.

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

And enigmatic smile is worth ten pages of dialog.

Listen to your inner self, it knows you best.