Writing Advice Quotes - Page 6

I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to the words you choose and the order in which you arrange them.

Darynda Jones

Writing is easy. Writing a publishable book is hard.

Eliza Green

Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

Luke Taylor

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.

Gudjon Bergmann

Getting started on writing a book isn't as hard as it sounds. You don't need a plan and an outline. In fact, all you need are two things: time and one idea.

Natasha Lester

Don't be afraid to get off the internet, the answers aren't all there. You may have to ask a cop about the kickback from a shotgun, or how sweaty they get in summer wearing body armor. Or what color blood is in the moonlight, or the vibrations through a serrated knife’s handle you feel in your fingers when you are hacking through somebody’s neck and hit cartilage.

Dan Alatorre

The more time you can put between you and your manuscript, the more fresh your eyes become and the more mistakes you’ll catch. Let a chapter rest for a day, you’ll see ways to improve it. Let your completed book rest a month or more and you’ll see stuff that’s long or that you want to skip. Read it out loud to get rid of awkward phrases and listen to your critique partners if they are good.

Dan Alatorre

Dialogues must appear as natural as if coming from effortless writing. It must not sweat. Your beloved readers must not sweat. But here am I, literally sweating, because my characters are literally talking dirty in a steamy sweaty and bloody scene.

Ana Claudia Antunes

To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!

Ana Claudia Antunes

Never use the passive voice. Do not say, 'It will get done.' Say, 'I'll do it,' and then stick to a solid, unwavering deadline

Gina Barreca

Writing's in the nouns.

Lori Roy

Set fire to cities and nations, to hearts and minds, to the very core of every human spirit. Make sure your words seep into the skin of the reader, leaving trace minerals that sustain the ailing human shell. Make them pay attention. Set fire to the soul. Anything less is an abomination to creation.

Susan Marie

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

Develop the skill of writing to avoid errors but if you do make them, don’t be demotivated

Bernard Kelvin Clive

It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.

Stewart Stafford

Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.

C.S. Lewis

When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.

Cheryl Strayed

Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity thatconstantly threatens to overload short-term memory.

Linda Flower

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

Joshua Wolf Shenk

We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing is trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.

Duncan B Barlow

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice.

Cheryl L. Ilov

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

Flannery O'Connor

If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

Ann Patchett

think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

Irvine Welsh

It's a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not by design. The wise writer writes the best he can and leaves it to posterity to decide about greatness.

Andrew M Greeley

Write what you wish with your soul and your heart will fill the page with your unique magic.

Ben Tolosa

The skill of writing needs much patience, practicing, and time. There is no good writing from a quick effort, or a confused writer.

Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Well, I like him. There’s a darkness to him. But does he make it all the way through?”She shrugged. “It’s entirely up to him.”“What do you mean?” He smiled quizzically at her.“Characters talk to you. Transform. Make choices,” she replied.“Choices,” he echoed.“Of who they become.

Nancy Holder

The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.

Val Kovalin

The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labour. It's a bridge you have to build all by yourself, all alone, all through the night, while the world goes about its business without giving a damn. The only way of making this perilous passage is by looking at it as a pilgrimage.

Shatrujeet Nath

Why do I write? Because I like telling stories and I don't like repeating myself (insert chuckle here).

NRN

Write as though your life depended on it.

Jill Telford

Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.

Christy Hall

Live inside your stories, yes, but do not hide behind them.

Christy Hall

Until you begin to write, then you shall know the wonders of the written word.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: "At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.

Woody Allen

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive--then don't be a writer.

Graham Swift

I've tried to explain to people that I don't 'love' writing any more than I 'love' breathing. It's something I do and it's something I need. If I thought about it as a love/hate thing, I probably would have quit long ago. And then died.

Allison M. Dickson

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes— is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune.

Lewis Carroll

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

Robert Hughes

Let your characters lead when you're dancing together.

Caron Kamps Widden

Writing is the act of discovery.

Natalie Goldberg

Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind. The chances are that you'll never make them identical. That's one reason I'm still hitting the keyboard. Obsessed by the secrets of my past, I try to put metaphorical versions of them on the page, but each time, no matter how honest and hard my effort, what's in my mind hasn't been fully expressed, compelling me to keep trying. To paraphrase a passage from John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," I'll die telling stories to myself in the dark. But there's never enough time. There was never enough time.

David Morrell

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. "This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends." He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. "In my mind, they were a whole lot better."Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind.

David Morrell

My best writing happens when I’m fighting to produce it.

Carla H. Krueger

A writer will always be a writer. It's not a choice, it's a destiny.

Stephanie Lennox

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

Philip Pullman

Write to evolve and you'll evolve to write.

Katina Ferguson

Ignore people who say you can't do it, even if this person is yourself.

Martha Reed

Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.

Roman Payne

I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then we are somehow diminished.

Dani Shapiro

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with itself-will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself.

Dani Shapiro

Live first, write second.

Miranda Paul

On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. — Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. — Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn’t help you. Do it your own way. — Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. — The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won’t write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck.

Anne Rice

Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.

Rob Bignell

A direct relationship exists between the caliber of the writing you read and the caliber of the writing you make.

Robert Benson

There’s really only one good writing habit: You must write constantly.

Rob Bignell

Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.

Carla H. Krueger

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

Carla H. Krueger

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Writing Advice Quotes - Page 6

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