Writing Craft Quotes - Page 2

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

Annie Dillard

An obscure flesh-and-blood Gascon, forgotten by History, transformed into a legendary giant by the novelist's genius

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

The best lie is the one that has an element of truth, so it’s good to include something real in your fiction.

Renee Conoulty

Don’t polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes aren’t improvements, they’re just changes.

Dan Alatorre

Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.

Dan Alatorre

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.

John Gardner

On working with other writers: You develop honesty and you can then ask the really embarrassing questions. I have learned so many things I didn’t want to know, and they were all a result of interesting interviews for background information.

Dan Alatorre

My characters still talk the way normal people talk. They argue, they are sarcastic with each other, they joke around. I usually end up with one outrageous minor character in each book that people just rave about. We all have that one friend who says and does things that are a riot. A character like that is the salt in the soup: you want just enough to bring everything to life.

Dan Alatorre

Inspiration is the crèche of your brainchildren. If you don’t feed them, they will die, and never come back. So someone please think about the children!

Kevin Focke

People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.

Dan Alatorre

Dig deep and go where the pain and fear and joy are, and put it out there. The minute you shy away from pure honesty in your writing, you become a liar.

Dan Alatorre

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk.

Stanley Fish

The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination

Danielle M. Maistry

The invisibility factor of women in this industry is not unlike the invisibility of girl geeks. We know we exist, but everyone else seems to think we’re an enigma every time they get the notion to write about us and what we apparently want. What we want isn’t any different than what anyone wants. Good stories. With characters we can relate to or identify with or that are interesting to read about. And we’d like to feel welcome, not the perpetual other. We don’t want to feel excluded or like props in every narrative. We don’t want or need every story to be about a girl character. But we’d like them to be treated with the same care and attention male characters are. And it is possible, even in male dominated narratives.

Mariah Huehner

I'm my characters' galley slave.

Chloe Thurlow

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive

Stanley Fish

Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

Colson Whitehead

For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.

Brett Armstrong

A good writer reveals beauty in the mundane and truth in tragedy. Words are a tool; a currency of the mind, and the best writers weave passages into our hearts that our bones remember.

Maria Reeves

There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread.

Noah Lukeman

You could say, in a way, that I'm not actually a writer, though perhaps I might be called a recorder? ... I just happen to be one of those holding the pen, that's all.

Etienne de L'Amour

When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.

Edwidge Danticat

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling

It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.

Betsy Lerner

I just write whenever I can.

Elmer Kelton

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

Thomas Harris

There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.

Aaron Allston

God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.

Gerard de Marigny

Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.

Tenaya Jayne

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.

George Bernard Shaw

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable

Jacques Barzun

This is important to writing. . . that is, it is important to my own writing. This. . . is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played in it, dug in it, planted in it, and walked over it. It is where I began. And all my writing begins with a landscape such as this. A place.

Patricia MacLachlan

Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth.

Stella Atrium

Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur...These factors--the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations--remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.Eric Leed

Robin Jarvis

Bringing you closer to the fragile edge of living is the job of a writer.

Julie Rodelli

I have this idea that writing is all about divergent thinking colliding with a hurricane of emotions.

R. Y.S. Perez

Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match....One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.

Renni Browne

At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her.Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse's power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.

Jacqueline Woodson

Rejection sucks. It sucks every time, whether it's a big suck or a little suck. But it's part of the process. It's part of being a writer. It's a badge that says 'I'm serious about this, and I'm sending out my work.

Allison K. Williams

All great movies have one thing in common: every frame of every scene could stand alone as a work of art. Why should it be different in a book?

Sean Hinn

There's no right way of writing. There's only your way.

Milton Lomask

Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.

T.L. Crain

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

Jamaica Kincaid

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

Stephen E. Ambrose

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

Kim Edwards

Writer's block? I've never heard of a plumber complain about plumber's block.

Robert B. Parker

I’ve come to the end of another book alive. At times like this I’m always at a loss for words.

Joe Coomer

Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.

Flannery O'Connor

I never really feel that I’m stuck. I actually think that people are never stuck, there’s no such thing as writers block, I think that theres terror that can silence you. But if you can think of it as a dynamic thing I mean a writers block, it’s a paralysis an immobility and the thing that has immobilized you is a very powerful force. Immobility is itself an act, it’s a choice. It can sometimes take as much energy to remain immobile as it does to be mobile. And if you think of it in a dynamic way then it’d freeze you from the sense that at some point your talent will simply abandon you and you’re just a vacant shell with nothing to say, I don’t think that ever really happens. But I think that terror, bad experience, trauma and so on can absolutely silence you.

Tony Kushner

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.

Horace Walpole

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.

Pat Conroy

Begin your writing, fiction or article, where the action begins. This action can be internal (e.g., an important insight or personal decision) or external (e.g., a murder or calamity). Begin too early, you lose your reader. Begin too late, you lose your story.

Walt Shiel

Good fiction makes the truth believable.

Tarrant Smith

Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. J.Paul Getty

Alison Wong

A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.

Bill Johnson

My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess.

Gene Wolfe

Write what is important to you, regardless of fashion or marketability or anything like that – all those things are so far out of your control that you may as well not think about them. Of course, this may mean you’ll never be published but that’s a risk we all take every single time we set hands to keyboard or pen to paper. For me, if I can sit back at the end of a project and say, ‘yes, I stayed honest, I said what I wanted to say, and I made it sing to the best of my ability’, then I’m happy enough. Of course, if anyone wants to buy the damned thing off me when I’m done, that’s jam I won’t refuse.

Celine Kiernan

To my mind, the most important thing in any form of fiction is the human element, but only if it takes us beyond the everyday, into situations that examine the complexities that may fascinate or puzzle us. To dwell on the mundane as some kind of a writing exeercise is useless.

Graham Worthington

The paradox of writing is that you’re trying to use words to express what words can’t express.

Stephen Fischer

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

William Hazlitt

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Writing Craft Quotes - Page 2

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