Writing Craft Quotes - Page 6

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

Pawan Mishra

If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.

Pawan Mishra

A writer gets to live yet another life every time she creates a new story.

Pawan Mishra

Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.

Pawan Mishra

Tell a story in lesser and simpler words.

Pawan Mishra

Don’t break the rules when you haven’t fully figured them out yet.

Pawan Mishra

Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.

Pawan Mishra

The good writing ideas don’t have to be about political turmoil, mass killings, capitalism, racism, injustice, etc. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart.

Pawan Mishra

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.

Pawan Mishra

A writer can do without food for a few hours, but not without the sight of books.

Pawan Mishra

Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.

Pawan Mishra

Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.

Pawan Mishra

If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.

Pawan Mishra

As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a lesser number of words.

Pawan Mishra

Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.

Pawan Mishra

You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.

Christina Westover

Be still my hand and let the words write themselves upon my heart. Be still my heart and let your pages be filled in silence.

Cristen Rodgers

I don't imagine book elitists as my audience when writing. I dream about teachers, morticians and garbage men instead.

Justin Alcala

Pursue knowledge as though it is your life-blood, then you will know greatness!

Monique Rockliffe

You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

William S. Wilson

...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

William S. Wilson

The hard part is putting one word after another.

Jo Linsdell

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

William S. Wilson

... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.

Elizabeth Sims

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

Margaret Jean Langstaff

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

Neil Gaiman

I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!

Ashly Lorenzana

Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.

Jessica Lave

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Tom Robbins

A dear and long-time friend,... asked me, "Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?" I replied, "Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its own rules. But for a statement to the world at large, once I've thought a book through and written it in my mind, it takes me around a week or so, depending on this and that, ordinarily at the rate of a chapter a day, but I've had some two-chapters day and some chapters have taken two days. And then of course there is revision, but around a week is about right." He seemed surprised, and I was surprised by his surprise, so I thought, maybe I'm wrong. I went home and wrote this book, at the perfectly normal pace of a chapter a day, as usual...

Jacob Neusner

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

Ray Bradbury

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

Annie Dillard

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

Janet Burroway

Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that's too much pressure and you'll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.

scavola

If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.

Linda W. Yezak

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

Edgar Allan Poe

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.

Stephen J. Cannell

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

Patricia C. Wrede

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.

Silas House

It's the writing that teaches you.

Isaac Asimov

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

George Orwell

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Ray Bradbury

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

Mickey Spillane

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

Sandra Brown

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

James Scott Bell

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

Michael Chabon

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

Tiffany Madison

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.

Amy Joy

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.

James J. Kilpatrick

Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.

Red Haircrow

If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.

Robert McKee

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

Michael Connelly

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

Iain M. Banks

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Robert Hass

I write to find strength.I write to become the person that hides inside me.I write to light the way through the darkness for others.I write to be seen and heard.I write to be near those I love.I write by accident, promptings, purposefully and anywhere there is paper. I write because my heart speaks a different language that someone needs to hear.I write past the embarrassment of exposure.I write because hypocrisy doesn’t need answers, rather it needs questions to heal. I write myself out of nightmares.I write because I am nostalgic, romantic and demand happy endings.I write to remember.I write knowing conversations don’t always take place.I write because speaking can’t be reread.I write to sooth a mind that races.I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand.I write because my emotions belong to the moon; high tide, low tide.I write knowing I will fall on my words, but no one will say it was for very long.I write because I want to paint the world the way I see love should be.I write to provide a legacy.I write to make sense out of senselessness.I write knowing I will be killed by my own words, stabbed by critics, crucified by both misunderstanding and understanding. I write for the haters, the lovers, the lonely, the brokenhearted and the dreamers.I write because one day someone will tell me that my emotions were not a waste of time. I write because God loves stories.I write because one day I will be gone, but what I believed and felt will live on.

Shannon L. Alder

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

C.S. Lewis

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.

George R.R. Martin

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

Stephen King

Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page?Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.Play with syntax.Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will.Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time).Maximum sentence length: seventeen words.Minimum: One.Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.

Richard Hugo

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Writing Craft Quotes - Page 6

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