On Writing Quotes

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.

John Jakes

Either give it your all or don't even try!

Avijeet Das

We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say "Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day" or "Annie seemed particularly happy that day."If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win.

Stephen King

I think the best thing about being a writer is getting to dream. It's constantly viewing life through the "what if?" lens.

Kevin J. Fitzgerald

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

John Steinbeck

It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.

Christopher Paolini

Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. … All those things.

R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.

Ben H. Winters

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.

Stephen King

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.

Edna O'Brien

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

Mark Twain

Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull. This wonderful and terrible word means “dead hand.” Its definition is: “The influence of the past regarded as controlling the present.” (It is also used as a legal term with the same basic meaning.

James Alexander Thom

If you don't know what those old occupations were, how they were done, and how they interacted with the passersby, you're not prepared to write a historical novel. A historical figure doesn't pass through a blank countryside. That means you, the novelist, must learn by research what the whole place was like in those times. As much as you can, you must be like someone who has lived there, because you're going to be not just the storyteller but also the tour guide taking your readers through the past.

James Alexander Thom

Some writers don't believe they're ready to begin writing the story until they've finished all the research they can think of to do — until they're sure of everything. That's a logical approach, of course. The more factual knowledge, the less likelihood you'll have to throw out a lot of glorious prose when you find out that something you assumed to be true wasn't.But one problem with delaying your start until the research is all done is that the research is never all done.

James Alexander Thom

Lucia Robson's facts can be trusted if, say, you're a teacher assigning her novels as supplemental reading in a history class. “Researching as meticulously as a historian is not an obligation but a necessity,” she tells me. “But I research differently from most historians. I'm looking for details of daily life of the period that might not be important to someone tightly focused on certain events and individuals. Novelists do take conscious liberties by depicting not only what people did but trying to explain why they did it.”She adds, “I depend on the academic research of others when gathering material for my books, but I don't think that my novels should be considered on par with the work of accredited historians. I wouldn't recommend that historians cite historical novels as sources.”And they sure don't. They wouldn't risk the scorn of their colleagues by citing novels. But, Lucia adds:“I think historical fiction and nonfiction work well together. … I'd bet that historical novels lead more readers to check out nonfiction on the subject rather than the other way around,” she says, and then notes:One of the wonderful ironies of writing about history is that making stuff up doesn't mean it's not true. And obversely, declaring something to be true doesn't guarantee that it is. In writing about events that happened a century or more ago, no one knows what historical ‘truth’ is, because no one living today was there.That's right. Weren't there. But will be, once a good historical novelist puts us there.

James Alexander Thom

Most historical accounts were written by fallible scholars, using incomplete or biased resource materials; written through the scholars' own conscious or unconscious predilections; published by textbook or printing companies that have a stake in maintaining a certain set of beliefs; subtly influenced by entities of government and society — national administrations, state education departments, local school boards, etcetera — that also wish to maintain certain sets of beliefs. To be blunt about it, much of the history of many countries and states is based on delusion, propaganda, misinformation, and omission.

James Alexander Thom

In my long career in this historical fiction business, though, I've found that the most effective storytelling concept is this: Once upon a time it was now.That has become my credo and my method as a longtime historical novelist.It's quite simple, if you see as Janus sees:Today is now.Yesterday was now.Tomorrow will be now.Three hundred years ago, the eighteenth century was now.You, as a historical novelist, can make any time now by taking your reader into that time. Once you grasp that, the rest is just hard work.Stay with me, and you'll see how such work is done.

James Alexander Thom

A novel, or so-called “fiction,” if deeply researched and conscientiously written, might well contain as much truth as a high-school history textbook approved by a state board of education. But having been designated “historical fiction” by its publisher, it is presumed to be less reliably true than that textbook. If fiction were defined as “the opposite of truth,” then much of the content of many approved historical textbooks could be called “historical fiction.”But fiction is not the opposite of truth. Fiction means “created by imagination.” And there is plenty of evidence everywhere in literature and art that imagination can get as close to truth as studious fact-finding can.

James Alexander Thom

my own definition of bad historical fiction hits these points:It fails to transport the reader to a former time.It fails to put the reader in another place.It fails to bring characters to life.It fails to make the reader shiver, sweat, sniffle, sneer, snarl, weep, laugh, gag, ache, hunger, wince, yearn, lust, lose sleep, empathize, hate, or need to go potty.It seems dubious.It has characters who seem too good or too bad to be true.It has anachronisms.It has clichés and stereotypes.Its writing style distracts the reader from the narrative.It takes historic license with times and facts.It is pointless.It is carelessly written.It is easy to put down.

James Alexander Thom

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire specialized college education on the society in which your story takes place, because all sorts of things were happening that you need to understand before you can even begin to tell a story in that milieu.

James Alexander Thom

...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Betsy Lerner

I would write:"The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam."Or:"The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream.""The old man huddled in the dark doorway, his bony face lit by the burning yellow in the windows of distant skycrapers."My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative.

Richard Wright

Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .

Dennis R. Miller

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom . . .

Philip Roth

Words writers choose are like a glimmering reflection into our souls.

Lee Bice-Matheson

Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product.

Julia Cameron

How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line—how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined—well, a good poem.

Ashley Hay

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

Stephen King

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps AllREALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time

Lisa Cron

Stories. Character. Dialouge. Entire worlds created on the page. Worlds that could sweep you away or frighten you, make you laugh or cry. Worlds that allowed you to escape to another country or time. Worlds built piece by piece of ink and punctuation.

Jamie Michaels

Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.

John Green

When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.

Mary Higgins Clark

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

Stephen King

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Ernest Hemingway

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

Norton Juster

I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences.

Sophia Rose

Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.

Thomas Moore

My writing, it’s my way of making sense of everything. My way to feel whole. May I never be complete and may I never feel content – please, let me always have the need, always have the urge to write.

Charlotte Eriksson

I learn my world through writing.

Charlotte Eriksson

There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.

Anne Lamott

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

Anne Lamott

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.

Anne Lamott

But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer to reach for anything but the nearest cliche'. "Shouldered his way," "only to be met," "crashing into his face," "waging a lonely war," "corruption that is rife," "sending shock waves," "New York's finest," - these dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look. We are in the hands of a hack, and we know it right away, We stop reading.

William Zinsser

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't been careful enough

William Zinsser

But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.

William Zinsser

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that wont the game.

William Zinsser

I write because I am a writer, not because I want to get anything out of it.

H. Raven Rose

Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit.

Andre Dubus

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

Stephen King

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

Stephen King

I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character study; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.

Stephen King

I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.

Stephen King

For me, all writing -- storytelling and style -- gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

Dennis R. Miller

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

Stephen King

I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences. Like vivid, rainbow metallic skin cells on the wings of a fragile butterfly, it is how you touch and reveal those inner parts of yourself, without damaging the psyche, that determines whether the beauty is experienced and expressed and shared with others or, in fact, becomes the death of the self and Soul and psyche. I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.

Sophia Rose

Pay attention, and use your imagination.

R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)

The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.

R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)

What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.

R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

David Foster Wallace

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On Writing Quotes

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