Writing Craft Quotes - Page 5

A good part of the physical attraction [between the hero and heroine of a romance novel] comes to life during these exchanges as well, since language creates a meeting of the minds. I have long thought that these lines of dialogue carve out the lines of the central love relationship. The dialogue between the hero and heroine creates the central shape of the story. It is the verbal sculpture.

Julie Tetel Andresen

Words are the writer's sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They're our enchantment and our temptation

Karl Wiggins

Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Every artist needs canvass, mine just happens to be Microsoft Word and a Thesaurus.

Lori Lesko

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

Gillian Marchenko

She logged in and read a few of her old posts, smiling at the issues she had raged about and shaking her head at how some of the rants now seemed pretentious and judgmental. She had grown so much without even realizing she had. Mythili typed out the draft, spicing it up subtly and after a last read, she published it. Admiring the brand new post on her main page, she realized she missed writing. She had barely written anything since her last by-line. Typing this out, she felt like she was back with a long-lost friend who understood her. It was like snuggling up in a warm blanket when a thunderstorm raged outside.

Shweta Ganesh Kumar

Storytellers don't show, they tell. I'm sticking with that.

Ashly Lorenzana

I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself.

Flannery O'Connor

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three

Michael Connelly

Authors - trust in your vision.

V.M. Sawh

*Persistence is more important than perfection. If at first you don’t succeed, it doesn’t matter as long as you always try, try again; *Small improvements, made consistently, add up; *You cannot fail unless you quit. What most people call failures are merely unsuccessful experiments. Failures are bumps on the road as long as your story remains a work in progress; *You can always do better with what you already have - and often, it’s much smarter to find ways to do so than to invest time and money trying something entirely new as your next one sure thing; *And most importantly, being good doesn’t matter nearly as much as being slightly better than yesterday.

Johnny B. Truant

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...)

Jim C. Hines

...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.

Rob Bignell

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul.

Rob Bignell

If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.

Fennel Hudson

Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

Ana Claudia Antunes

The moment I realize I just stayed up until five in the morning writing is that moment I know I am meant to be a writer.

Anastasia Bolinder

A writer creates from his mind; his creations emanate from the feelings enmeshed deep within his heart. From the fire burning within his soul, he gives shape to his thoughts. His thoughts start to breathe. Every sentence breathes with a purpose.

Avijeet Das

I personally believe that one learns to write by writing.

Jack Jordan

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

Chris Everheart

...I’ve never understood the logic that says a work doesn’t need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I’ve also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer.

Glen Hirshberg

...the most beautiful things don't always make you happy - often they make you weep...

John Geddes

poems are small moments of enlightenment

Natalie Goldberg

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

Lisa Cron

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

Characters begin as your children and become your teachers.

Chloe Thurlow

How many great gems were lost to thoughtand not put down to pen.You can but think of just a fewand then they're lost again.

L.F.Young

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

Flannery O'Connor

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Roman Payne

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

Brad Leithauser

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.

Robert M. Pirsig

...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...

John Geddes

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.

Vivian Gornick

If God inspires your writing, others will know because it will inspire them when they read it.

Cecil Murphey

Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.

Austin Penman

Writing is a lifelong disease. Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.

J.R. Tompkins

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.

Anne Lamott

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

Anne Carson

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

William H. Gass

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

Zbigniew Herbert

I’ve learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it’s not what I thought it was. It doesn’t make you special and sparkly. You don’t have to walk alone. You can work in an office — I’ve worked in offices for the past 15 years and written five novels while doing it. The creative life is forgiving: You can betray it all you want, again and again, and no matter how many times you do, it will always take you back.

Lev Grossman

People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

Michelle M. Pillow

It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.

Larry McMurtry

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

Charles Finch

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

Kelly Marcel & Sue Smith

Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced into an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.

Kij Johnson

I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

Catherine Lowell

Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book. What you need is subtlety.

Sandy Vaile

Backstory is like a flavour you can’t quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it’s there and it enhances the flavour, but it’s intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly!

Sandy Vaile

Delayed gratification hints that something terrible is going to happen, and then delays the resolution. It’s that interval between the promise of something awful and it actually happening, where suspense resides.

Sandy Vaile

Suspense doesn’t always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story.

Sandy Vaile

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

Siri Hustvedt

The pen is mightier than the sword as long as it doesn't run out of ink.

Matshona Dhliwayo

They say instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of clichés, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising. However, who has not hung on a scripture, a quote, a statement, only to stumble upon the key phrase that brought all things to a turning point? The greatest sermons and speeches were pieced together by illuminating thoughts that powered men to surpass their own commonness. It is the sparkling magic of letters forming words, and those words colliding with passion, that makes statements into wisdom.

Shannon L. Alder

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.

Koren Zailckas

Inspiration surrounds us, the creation is our responsibility as artists.-Lyn Crain

Lyn Crain

The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking.

Allan Lokos

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.

Roy Peter Clark

Don’t interrupt when your characters take a flight of their own.

Pawan Mishra

Cliches are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.

Pawan Mishra

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Writing Craft Quotes - Page 5

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