Writing Craft Quotes - Page 4

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

Zadie Smith

If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can't make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more. One other thing, quality comes with practice. If you are prolific, then you become a better writer because you are writing. The more you do anything the better at it you will become. So in a way, quantity does add to quality.

Larry Correia

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

Ray Bradbury

You write what you know, and I know rock and roll.

Greg Kihn

Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.

Christy Hall

There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.

Gerard de Marigny

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.

John Irving

[G]reat stories communicate simple truths that reflect the poetic dimensions of the human soul. Not only do powerful characters help us understand our lives, their stories reflect our core values as human beings.

Kate Wright

I recommend writing standing up from time to time. It's easier to dance when you finish writing.

Diego Ramos

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

Ernest Hemingway

Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.

Jennifer Hudson Taylor

And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.

Darynda Jones

If you don’t make time for writing, writing won’t make time for you.

Sandra Elaine Scott

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

Luke Taylor

All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten feet away, the smell of dust falling onto the hot bulb in the lamp. That's the miracle of writing, the place you try to find--when the room, your body, and even time itself cooperate in a vanishing act.

Anthony Doerr

And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.

Anthony Doerr

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

Writing's in the nouns.

Lori Roy

Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects everything to its needs.

Elena Ferrante

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

Stephen King

Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

William Goldman

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

I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.

Chigozie Obioma

As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun.

Heather Grace Stewart

I like to think I’ve written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters.

Carla H. Krueger

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Ernest Hemingway

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

When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library.

Donald Richie

Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb "snuffle.

Rachelle McCalla

All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Anne Lamott

I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.

Rayne Hall

It is a truth universally acknowledged, he’d mused, that most people will never find their ‘call me Ishmael’.

Django Wylie

Let your characters lead when you're dancing together.

Caron Kamps Widden

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

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure images, to suspend disbelief, to enter a world visible only in their minds. It is in that unseen world where the art of the writer lives.

Mindie Burgoyne

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

Stephanie Lennox

Writing doesn’t get any easier with time or talent. If writing is easy for you, you’re probably still learning the craft. You haven’t perfected your style or landed upon your “voice.” You haven’t learned to analyze your writing with a critical eye, to rip it apart and figure out why it isn’t doing exactly what you want.

Darynda Jones

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

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

Rob Bignell

Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write this? Did I have that insight? Sometimes you know something is good, good within your own limits, and those parts make life worth living.

Chloe Thurlow

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft

Maxine Hong Kingston

Why the tag of ‘aspiring’ writer be the wishful cliché? It’s like a bumper sticker. Say it! I am a Writer. Period. We may all have a target and gradation toward successes, a personal illusion/perception. The quality or perseverance in one’s craft is your act. Flaws? Sure. Yet, you are a Writer, not a wannabe. Let go of the tags. Just write!

JT Sanz

Open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day.

Dan Alatorre

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

Joanna Penn

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

Joanna Penn

Being a writer is not just about typing. It’s also about surviving the rollercoaster of the creative journey.

Joanna Penn

When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.

Joanna Penn

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

Karl Ove Knausgård

What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.

Allison K. Williams

Writing is like surfing on a wild sea, in the middle of a moonless night, in a hailstorm, on a deserted island.Yeah... that about sums it up.

Heena Rathore P.

A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure

Karl Wiggins

Every one of the big breakthroughs in the art of literature have possibly started as what many would call a ludicrous or even laughable idea as the writer occasionally balances a routine piece with an investment in the eccentric and untried. Over time, the reward is usually worth the risk

Karl Wiggins

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

Louis L'Amour

Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. It’s the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.

Glen Hirshberg

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

Stella Atrium

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

Orson Scott Card

I should be writing ...

Mur Lafferty

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Writing Craft Quotes - Page 4

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