Writing Process Quotes - Page 3

Rather than feeling that every moment you’ve got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.

Stuart Dybek

Writing is like making love, editing is like giving your great grandfather a sponge bath.

Midnight Taylor

An opportunity lost may have motivated us to find a satisfying alternative. Adversity or suffering may have taught us certain important skills. Some writers have felt new appreciation for their lives after surviving a serious illness or disability. A fortunate outcome does not invalidate the unfortunate aspect.

Nan Merrick Phifer

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

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.

Jonathan Maas

In the 'Life' of George Eliot, John Walter Cross gave an intriguing account of Eliot's creative method. "She told me that, in all her best writing, there was a 'not herself' which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting," Cross wrote.

Rebecca Mead

It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries;but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn’t wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she’s a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else — things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things — but she doesn’t wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word.

Ursula K Le Guin

Do what you love...

Lise Cartwright

Briefer is better, so learn to write tight

Angela Elwell Hunt

The challenge of the writer is to transform—artistically and imaginatively—a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.

Hillel F. Damron

Trawling through a dusty attic of my addled memory I found that I’d been rather in a lot of daft and amusing situations, so I set about writing them down. The only problem being that I was a lot better at telling stories than writing them, probably because telling them involves a lot less typing and a lot more shouting.

Guy Pratt

There's nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself." Professor Piper

Rainbow Rowell

I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world.

Susan Sontag

The movementOf the body isWhere poetryBegins

Clint Catalyst

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

John Irving

There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.

Darynda Jones

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

Sandra Elaine Scott

Writings are thoughts in a defined moment.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Writing is easy. Saying something that would make a difference is the task.

Aleksandra Ninkovic

Humor is so subjective, not everyone is going to get what you are peddling. Others will be offended when what you meant no offense whatsoever. Those are the stakes. You have to be able to stand up for yourself and what you’ve written. Comedy pushes limits, makes people uncomfortable, and is a natural reaction to the environment. Otherwise, as I said, it is forced. Let it flow and give your characters permission to cross a line or two, but only if you can take the heat afterward.

Darynda Jones

When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down.

Stephen King

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan.

Marcel Proust

I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to the words you choose and the order in which you arrange them.

Darynda Jones

Writing to impress others is the surest path to pretentious mediocrity.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

And now, I have another good reason to speed up my baby narratives to make my author's profile appear more respectable.

Armineonila M.

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea.

Amy Poehler

There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. But some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea is the thing to write on and write into the title at the head of your paper… One idea and a few subordinate ideas — [the trick is] to have those happen to you as you read and catch them — not let them escape you… The sidelong glance is what you depend on. You look at your author but you keep the tail of your eye on what is happening over and above your author in your own mind and nature.

Robert Frost

I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi

William Faulkner

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Virginia Woolf

Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.

Adam Langer

There are students that are scattered, who need to see something through to the finish, but I would say there are possibly more who do not entertain the leaps of the mind that need to be nurtured, and this desire to finish becomes more about being a good student than about finishing something interesting. Where does work ethic fit in with writing? I think that's pretty complicated from one writer to the next. You need some kind of work ethic, but what does it look like for you?

Aimee Bender

...he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to story that he finally couldn't write it...When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another.

Pete Dexter

Talk about something else. Tell me about this book you are writing." "What book?" I say. Then : "Oh, I know what you mean. I am not doing that anymore. I couldn't finish._________I don't think he knows, not really. Not yet. In my haste to finish this story before death overtakes me, inevitably I have left out many things, and often I have expresses myself inelegantly, and no doubt here and there I have said more than I meant to. When you return, my dear type writer, we will review what we have done, and add this and subtract that. This work has become my hobby and my consolation, and I enjoy it.

Phillip Margulies

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.

Haruki Murakami

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like -- what’s going on -- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness]

Ursula K Le Guin

Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it . . . The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I wanted to flee from Thomas's house.

Janet Malcolm

There are three difficulties in authorship: – to write anything worth publishing - to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it. — Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]

Caleb C. Colton

I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then I rewrite.

Gudjon Bergmann

It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every time you would hand in an assignment, a paper, or even a thesis. Your book needs time to mature, and you must allow yourself the luxury of rewriting and editing until you are satisfied.

Gudjon Bergmann

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.

Anita Shreve

Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession

Alexandra Johnson

When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it.

Alvi Syahrin

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture — still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish.

Charlotte Brontë

Developing your voice takes... time and practice.

Darynda Jones

In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.

C.G. Jung

The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.

Claudia Bakker

Writing is easy. Writing a publishable book is hard.

Eliza Green

A simple word or phrase on a blank sheet of paper gathers momentum as I wonder at what it could mean, where it could take place, why, and what if? . . . And then, I write.

Tyrean Martinson

Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

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

Luke Taylor

I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing. And it's really in the gap - it's in the erasures - that I think the novelist can best go to work because inevitably in history in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question, why did it happen the way it did? Where was the turning point?

Hilary Mantel

Writing means sharing. It's part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, opinions.

Paulo Coelho

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.

Gudjon Bergmann

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

Begin at the beginning as you understood it, proceed through the middle, continue to the end, and then stop," said Master Li, and he sauntered out to get drunk....

Barry Hughart

For people who make up stories for a living, that is the ultimate success: knowing that, when the book closes, when the series ends, the adventure is not over. It goes on without the creator, in the minds of the people who love it. You can’t stop the signal. Once it’s broadcast, it continues on forever, pulsing past star clusters, lighting up new worlds, collecting new fans, till the end of time itself.

Sharon Shinn

I have learned how I work best, and that is something that, if you're going to be a professional writer, you should be noticing: under what circumstances you work at your best, and to not get yourself cornered into writing in a way that doesn't let you do your best.

Ursula K Le Guin

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content—kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on. I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don’t want to get somewhere, you just don’t want to fall off your board. I think the equivalent of balance is tone, so I think tone gives birth to the story.

Etgar Keret

Writing is hard work. Attempting to write a decent story is friggin exhausting!

Veronica Purcell

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Writing Process Quotes - Page 3

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