Writing Process Quotes

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.

Shandy L. Kurth

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.

Joyce Carol Oates

...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...

John Geddes

I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." - 1946

Henri Matisse

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?""Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.

Dorothy L. Sayers

I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.

Guy Kawasaki

I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack

Kim Cormack

...there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...

John Geddes

...I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...

John Geddes

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules...

Umberto Eco

I’m feeling a low regarding writing. I sometimes think I should finish working on my book of stripper poetry that I started, but other times I feel like it’s not worth it. Sometimes I think I should work on my comic book idea, and then other times I want to work on a website, and still other times I think I should be working on this memoir. That’s a lot of thinking about writing without a whole lot of writing going on.

Sheila Hageman

Most—but not all—of the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn’t want to be anyone’s employee if it interfered with their writing. They were halfway or all the way outside the mainstream and were often not interested in becoming part of the burgeoning corporate society. They had more freedom than your average American.

Sterling Lord

To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone else’s work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make it our own.

Christopher Stocking

...the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...

John Geddes

Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!"' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear.

Russell T. Davies

Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.

Guy Kawasaki

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written

Julia Cameron

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

Jonathan Carroll

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.

Paul Auster

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Ernest Hemingway

...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...

John Geddes

... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...

John Geddes

If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will.

Mark Twain

You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.

Ian McEwan

Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that’s one-third of a triathlon (authoring, publishing, and entrepreneuring).

Guy Kawasaki

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

Virginia Woolf

For me, not knowing your theme until your finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe – there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there’s a high chance it won’t work.

David G. Allen

I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

E.W. Hornung

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply ‘pencil work’ as John O’Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work.

Malcolm Cowley

I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will probably be nonexistant a 100 years later, but - you know - i have no idea what else to do. I like creating. What else can i do?

Martijn Benders

He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he'd written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.

Laura Z. Hobson

Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.

Andromeda Edison

Many a good story has been found in the bottom of a decent Rioja.

Ken Scott

Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?

Stephen Fry

The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I've somehow got to fill.

Mike Carey

The effect your readers want is for what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what's happening in the story. They don't want approximations, they don't want a report, they want to experience the story's reality.

Ray Rhamey

Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.

Hal Zina Bennett

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.

Jeanette Winterson

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

I miss the days when I was alone with my characters and no one else knew them except me.

Lian Hearn

Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn’t easy, but it’s fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.

Guy Kawasaki

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.

Guy Kawasaki

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

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

Iain Banks

Start with a word. A word leads to a sentence, which leads to a paragraph, which leads to a chapter, which leads to a manuscript, which leads to a book..... just start with a word!

Mark Pettinger

Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don’t limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You’d be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair.Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You’ll never have fun being someone you’re not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out.Also, don’t be afraid to fail, and don’t be afraid to walk away. Writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s totally fine. One doesn’t need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction.

T.E. Grau

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

Want to be a writer? take a good book a good pen and a notepad to bed with you every night of your life.

Ken Scott

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

Roger Ebert

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

Haruki Murakami

I'm writing a book. I'm almost finished. I numbered the pages. Now all I have to do is fill them in.

Steven Wright

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

Ernest Hemingway

I'm really just playing when I write. I feel like I'm a kid again. I want my characters to do and say things like when I played with dolls!

Lori Lesko

The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.

Cynthia Ozick

The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

George Saunders

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It’s tradition and form—fear of the unknown—driving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can hearwhen I stand alonein the middle of an art show….

Chila Woychik

I don’t need to write. Madness or suicide are other options, though not nearly as compelling. But I want to create; I hope to create worlds in my own image, admittedly a self-centered plan. I want others to understand me better, pay more attention to me, like or love me for who I am. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe I should simply learn to say, “Let’s have lunch.

Chila Woychik

This isn’t a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It’s a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it’s printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.

Chila Woychik

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Writing Process Quotes

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