Writing Process Quotes - Page 5

When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross over an intricate boarder where the conscious and unconscious minds meet, traversing the aperture where the real and the imaginary intermingle. I aspire to establish a detached vantage point where I can survey the entire human condition.

Kilroy J. Oldster

The Paraclete and "Book of Martha" narratives were ultimately versions of the dream of "fixing" of the human species that had driven (and stymied) the Parables books: "On the one hand," she writes in her journal, "I want to write fix-the-world scenario. I seem to need to write them. The fact that I don't believe in them--don't believe humanity is fixable--does create a problem

Gerry Canavan

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.

Elena Ferrante

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.

C.S. Lewis

When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.

Cheryl Strayed

When in doubt, go the scandalous route.

Kilian Grey

Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity thatconstantly threatens to overload short-term memory.

Linda Flower

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

Joshua Wolf Shenk

To write a novel is to dream a story and write it down on the page. That’s why the power of a really good story is one of true magic. Good stories engage the reader utterly in the writer’s dream so the dream becomes theirs, too.

Wendy J. Dunn

We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing is trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.

Duncan B Barlow

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.

Samuel S. Vaughan

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice.

Cheryl L. Ilov

Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person’s own precursors: it revises a person’s conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the “now,” and alters the course and outcome person’s future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person’s thoughts, debunk a person’s delusion, and analyze a person’s values.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Being a writer, I think, is much like being a parent or a pet parent in my case. I love all of my characters equally, even if I want you to hate them, I love them. If you don't love all your characters you're not doing it right.

Ellie Elisabeth

I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.

Stephen King

Writers don't kill characters. Characters kill characters.

MariaLisa deMora

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

William Inge

The last chapter in 'Alice in Worcestershire' is called 'Writing the book'.I started to write that 'Diary' chapter at the very beginning of the process and followed it through to the end... speaking to the reader.My decision to do this was because I've often read autobiographies and wondered how the author felt and how it impacted them writing about painful memories that had been locked away in a deep forgotten place.I wanted to know what was going in their 'present' life while they were writing; about the struggle with sharing their inner secrets and... I'm... inquisitive. (nosy)!It took me over five years to finish 'Alice in Worcestershire' because sometimes, I was simply too drained to continue. Periodically, I updated the 'Diary' chapter and, thankfully, it's enthusiastically appreciated by readers.

Eskay Teel

Don't let others define your dreams.

Tres Buffalo

Writing a novel is a bit like being Daniel Boone. An author stands atop a ridge in a mountain range and can generally see a number of peaks in the distance. What lies between those peaks—the dales and glens, rivers, forests, and other features that distinguish one mountain landscape from another... is where the artistry and intrigue of the writing process lives. As the writer sets out into the story, leaving behind those high points—the beginning, a twist here and there, the climax, and, if perhaps a bit indistinct for the distance to cover, the end—entering the vale below, all manner of things can happen the writer never intended or expected at the onset.

Brett Armstrong

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer’s is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one these particles, these molecules of texts, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own? I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again. [p.268]

Amos Oz

In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer's memory - like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes.

Ian McEwan

I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative.

Peter Straub

Good writing is rhythm.

William Peter Blatty

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

Flannery O'Connor

But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

Dani Shapiro

If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

Ann Patchett

think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

Irvine Welsh

I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.

Chigozie Obioma

It is the trivial little facts about anything that describe it the most effectively.

Mary MacLane

Writing is the act of finding out what I think.

Stephen King

As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

It's a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not by design. The wise writer writes the best he can and leaves it to posterity to decide about greatness.

Andrew M Greeley

At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind’s dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind’s dungeons.

Avijeet Das

A writer must be willing to leave oneself behind in order to explore new territories of the mind and unearth primordial truths that startle and frighten us.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I don’t shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that.

Peter Straub

Write what you wish with your soul and your heart will fill the page with your unique magic.

Ben Tolosa

I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.

M.V. Carey

Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.

M.V. Carey

More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

M.V. Carey

Writing involves many [acts] tasks, not just generating text

Paul J. Silvia

A chef’s magic is his ingredients, how he can substitute one for another, then break with convention by changing it all around again without once referring to the recipe. And then just at the death complete the beauty by adding another element never previously thought of. Well words are the writer’s sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They’re our enchantment and our temptation. Sometimes both the chef and the writer overindulges himself and it gets out of hand, but that’s how we like it, it’s how we’ve ghosted some of our best creations.

Karl Wiggins

When you hurt one of your characters and then type faster to finish a scene while saying, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!

A.R. Fagundes

The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say.

Mark Twain

By applying their observational abilities along with full appliance of their logic and creative powers, writers attempt to create mental maps to share with other people regarding what they learned, think, and believe. The writer’s vision can sway readers emotional state and in doing influence what they believe and how they behave.

Kilroy J. Oldster

It’s one of those times when the question is its own answer…. The writing is itself the solution to the inability to write!

Yael Shahar

Personal essay writing is analogous to undertaking a vision quest, a potential turning point in life taken to discover intimate personal truths, form complex abstract thoughts, and ascertain the intended spiritual direction of a person’s life.

Kilroy J. Oldster

When entering a library, I never forget to bow down!

Avijeet Das

The structured form of an outline helps us to keep track of all plot lines in a series, and of course, this diminishes the chance of plot holes for us.

Lydia Larue

Don’t hold back and save stuff for the next book. Put everything you have into the one you’re writing, - Michael Connelly

Sue Ward Drake

You only fail if you stop writing.RAY BRADBURY

Sue Ward Drake

Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.

Chris Baty

Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun.

Heather Grace Stewart

Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue--the clue--lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift--rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting.

Philip K Dick

It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.

Hanya Yanagihara

I like to think I’ve written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters.

Carla H. Krueger

I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

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Writing Process Quotes - Page 5

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