Writing Process Quotes - Page 2

In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It’s written for writing’s sake, as if I were to say, “Let me tell you I’m dying.” Well of course I am. So are you.

Chila Woychik

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

Greg Kihn

A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?

Mary Papas

The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now — he’ll be mad if it’s TV dinners again — but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record — don’t stop til you get enough.

Stephen King

Books most certainly don't write themselves, but life does. When in doubt about what to write, use your own life.

Solomon Woytowich

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

Stephen King

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

Christy Hall

A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.

Gary Reilly

Inspiration do not come and cannot be found, it has to exist - somewhere, somehow. Do believe that what you are doing is the most important thing in this world, and do believe that your words can be magical. Because I know they can be and I know they are. If you feel that you are lost in your own mind, don’t think, just write. Sometimes we have to erase our thoughts and memories to gain enough strength to be able to write down our inner thoughts. If you don’t know what it is, if you think it’s ridiculous or silly, you’re definitely on the right way. Sometimes you will hate your words and sometimes you will love them. This is the fun part of greatness in which the other part definitely will be your devil. Remember; with greatness comes obstacles.

Liv-Christine Hoem

Writing, is not a race. Is to distill the soul letter by letter in a slow and delicate process that will take years.

J.E. Negrete

Do not worry about what words to use. Worry about why this story needs to be told and the rest will take care of itself.

Moira Katson

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

Dani Shapiro

There's an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer's mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over again until it is right--all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.

William Souder

The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.

Chila Woychik

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

It's basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn't and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is that it will snowball. the best way to put it is that I have no particular method or technique per se, other than this: I plan nothing, I outline nothing, I start with an idea or an image or a line of dialogue and see where it leads me. Because I never know what the next page will contain, let alone the end of the book, I am perpetually surprised by the course that my characters take. The writing process is as full of surprises and twists for me as the reading experience is for my readers. I love the spontaneity of writing this way, the possibilities left open, the feeling that I am not constrained or committed to any given path. Every day, I am surprised by something. It may not be the most efficient way of writing, but it has served me well thus far.

Khaled Hosseini

So I suppose one danger is that we might get the idea that, you know, “to blurt, is to be.” The idea that whatever comes out is good and is us. Whereas someone who has really worked with text realizes – well, that neither one is “really” you, but that the considered version might represent a “higher” you – brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder.

George Saunders

Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.

Seamus Heaney

And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to gain entrance to their minds and feelings, to respect them for themselves as human individuals, and to portray them as truly as we can. The whole process of fiction is a mysterious one, and a writer, however experienced, remains in some ways a perpetual amateur, or perhaps a perpetual traveller, an explorer of those inner territories, those strange lands of the heart and spirit.

Margaret Laurence

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write.

John Steinbeck

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

Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.

Kevin James Breaux

I am a perfectionist in spirit

Bob D'Eith

Never stop writing. Whether you’re writing a novel, screen play or just keeping a journal, it’s integral that you make writing a daily process. The proof of the commitment to your craft is just how much time you spend doing it, whether it’s for business or pleasure. Integrate your craft into your every day life, and you’ll be as good as gold.

Leigh Hershkovich

You cannot write the pages you love without writing the pages you hate. Nothing that you write is pointless, useless, or unnecessary. The product requires the process. The good days may be more enjoyable, but the tough ones are the ones they’re built upon.

Robin Black

When I sleep tonight I dream of what I will imagine tomorrow.

T.A. Uner

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.

Virginia Woolf

All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

Mo Yan

Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.

Ron Brackin

[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

On some days, writing is wonderful. On the days when it is wonderful, it feels like you are the God of a universe that the rest of the world is not yet privy to. And then on some days, it is not wonderful; those days when nothing is coming and the cursor seems to be openly mocking you, blinking out ‘YOU SUCK AT WRITING AND YOU’RE UGLY AS BALLS’ in Morse code.

Leigh Whannell

The Russian-born novelist's writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever order he pleased...

Mason Currey

On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.

Chuck Wendig

People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time they have reached this decision, they have had a simple education.

Muriel Spark

I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.

Anna Quindlen

I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'l have a book. It is such a pleasurable moment that I type many more title pages than I could ever use.

Betsy Byars

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

Peter Selgin

Writing had never become routine for him, but remained a constant surprise. He was always surprised at how much fun it was, once it all got moving. And never failed to be surprised at how bloody hard it was. It was like having an intense, frustrating love affair with a capricious, gorgeous, and often mean-spirited woman.He loved every moment of it.

Nora Roberts

It’s very hard — weirdly hard — to clear your mind of all that crap so that you can just sit down and write and find that place where you’re just involved and enjoying the imaginary place you’ve discovered. All the other “problems” with writing are just puzzles, and they can be interesting to try to crack, even when it’s frustrating.

Dan Chaon

I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious. Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know. Science fiction primarily uses the medium of physics and mathematics. It tells us how things work, or could work. Horror taps into the darker imagery of the psychology, telling us what we should fear. Fantasy, magic and myth, however, tap into the spiritual potential of the human life. Their medium is symbolism, truth made manifest in word pictures, and they tell us what things mean on a deep, internal level. I have always been a meaning-maker. I have always been someone who strives to make sense of everything and perhaps that is where my life as a storyteller first began. Life doesn't always make sense, but story must. And so I write stories, and the world comes right again.

Ripley Patton

Writing is like bungee jumping for the soul...you take a deep breath, plunge into the abyss and hope the rope tethering you to the real world doesn't snap.

Judy Croome

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

Diego Ramos

What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.

Nancy Zafris

Dedicating a writing session to someone is like sending a prayer for them out into the world. I will never know if my writing, my dedication to them, my prayer for them made any difference in their lives. But I know it makes a difference in mine.

Elizabeth Rusch

People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose you

Sebastian Faulks

The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.

Dani Shapiro

Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.

Françoise Sagan

Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial.

Pamela Erens

Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe: 1. Write a simple narrative. 2. Make a long list. 3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

Jaclyn Moriarty

I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: each time I was overcome with fear. Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons—and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them: they run off—and how will you ever get control of them again! They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper—black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and implore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind.

Nikos Kazantzakis

To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don't come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated. But it's not a question of the will, it is a mechanism I can set in motion or not, like scratching my nose or doing a backward roll.

Muriel Barbery

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

Tracy Kidder

You don't teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

Virginia Woolf

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

Nelson Algren

The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She was, in a sense, sitting at a craps table with her last stack of chips, trying again and again to hit it big.

Ann Patchett

At it's best,the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then - and only then - it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way.

The Writing Life

A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.

Don Roff

What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it's the closest thing to being God you're ever going to get. All the decisions are yours. You decide when the sun comes up. You decide who gets to fall in love and who gets hit by a car. You have to make all the trees and all the leaves and then sew the leaves onto the trees. You make the entire world.

Ann Patchett

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

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Writing Process Quotes - Page 2

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