Writing Advice Quotes - Page 8

If you only had a year left to live, what book would you write?Now, write that book.

M. Kirin

The only way to overcome fear and doubt is to go against them.

M. Kirin

Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is beyond our reach. The best time to write is now, in the present.

M. Kirin

Every writer in the history of the world has been afraid to put words on the page. But we only remember those who overcame that fear.

M. Kirin

If you were waiting for a sign that you’re meant to be a writer…THIS IS IT.

M. Kirin

You were meant to write this book.

M. Kirin

You’re writing someone’s ‘future’ favorite book.

M. Kirin

If you wish to be a writer– then write, and don’t allow anyone to tell you that you’re on the ‘wrong’ path. You know where you’re going, and each word you write gets you a step closer.

M. Kirin

Even great, best selling writers produce works that fall flat from expectations. This writing thing isn't easy and everything you produce won't be a best seller, but you must write anyway. You have to write because you love it, because it fuels you, because you can feel the stories living inside you, nudging you, prodding you, itching to get out and the only thing worse than writing it and failing is not writing it. As the late Maya Angelou once said, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."Even if your work doesn't resonate with others, it is still worth writing. And that in itself, is what's important.

Nancy Arroyo Ruffin

Description is the color in the canvas of your story.

M. Kirin

TODAY IS A GREAT DAY TO MAKE ART.

M. Kirin

Do you think you’re not ‘ready’ to start that big story idea/project you’ve been thinking about forever?Jump in. Write anyway. The only way to make the impossible a reality is to take a leap of faith.

M. Kirin

All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.

M. Kirin

Writing is an adventure. There is no way to know where it will take you, and what you will find. You could find success. You could find fans. Or, best of all, you could find yourself.

M. Kirin

Stop beating yourself up over all the days you didn’t work on your story. Focus on what you can do today.Sit down, and write.

M. Kirin

All great writers share one thing in common:They finished their books.

M. Kirin

Originality is not writing the story that has never been told, but writing the stories only you can tell.

M. Kirin

...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.

On a related note, I think for many of us, the first step in becoming a good writer is to write crap. In all seriousness, none of us are born knowing how to write. Almost all of us will produce a lot of really lousy stories before we start to get good. (Not all of us will choose to publish those lousy stories, but that's a whole separate discussion...)

How do you paint a writer's block?Just fill it with fifty shades of black.

Ana Claudia Antunes

...ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the crowding passive voice sentences.

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul.

There is always, always, always something to write about.

Every book I've read appears in my writing.

The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

A writer must pay attention his or her surroundings.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.

William Strunk Jr.

If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at the cats. The writer of the letter asked a civil question; attack cats, then, only if you can do so with good humor, good taste, and in such a way that your answer will be courteous as well as responsive. Since you are out of sympathy with cats, you may quite properly give this as a reason for not appearing at the dedicatory ceremonies of a cat hospital. But bear in mind that your opinion of cats was not sought, only your services as a speaker. Try to keep things straight.

William Strunk Jr.

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is delete words.

Alessandra Torre

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.

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.

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.

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

Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "Individual" (man or woman), "remainder" (rest), "initial" (first), "implement" (do), "sufficient" (enough), "attempt" (try), "referred to as" (called), and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write. Don't dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don't interface with anybody.

William Zinsser

Fanscination is what keeps a writer going. To be able to write, a writer has to be fascinated about a particular something that becomes the idea of the story

I personally believe that one learns to write by writing.

What is so frightening about [writing]? I still don't know. Perhaps it's the horrible knowledge that no matter how well you write, the resultant product will never correlate exactly to the truth, will never arrive with quite the melodious voice you hear in the acoustic cavity of your mind.

When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.

Don Roff

Poems arrive. They hide in feelings and images, in weeds and delivery vans, daring us to notice and give them form with our words. They take us to an invisible world where light and dark, inside and outside meet.

Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge

...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...

Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that – but you are the only you.

Every book has its ancestors

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Writing is exposing yourself to strangers

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Writing is a competition between the writer and the page. When the page wins, you fail as a writer.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

I am sorry, I am not a writer. I simply put my thoughts on paper. Those helped by them call them a book and me a writer. Those who are not helped call it rubbish and me a fool. Both have reason.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

One day I will write a book. An epitaph

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Build your novel one word at a time. Remember that minutes = novels.

Mercedes M. Yardley

Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.

The only difference between writers and people who don't write is that writers aren't afraid to display their demons.

Carla H. Krueger

You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.

The thing I've learned is that thinking is not writing.

Erica Lorraine Scheidt

Keep working. Keep trying. Keep believing. You still might not make it, but at least you gave it your best shot. If you don’t have calluses on your soul, this isn’t for you. Take up knitting instead.

...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...

...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

Aspiring novelists should be taught that the old adage, “Write about what you know,” isn’t limited to what you have personally experienced. Vicarious experience is also a great part of what you know. Read a lot of history and it becomes part of your store of knowledge, part of what you’re prepared to write about. The same goes for stories and memories that other people share with you.

James Carlos Blake

Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.

...people quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression...

...how many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely...

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