Writing Process Quotes - Page 7

I’m an observer. I am fascinated by people and how their minds work (and, of course, my own). Why we are the way we are, why we do the things we do – and that interest drives my writing. I was a physicist before fiction claimed my soul, so I’m an experimenter. I’m open to different ways of thinking. I like exaggerating, making things up. I’m a very open, honest person in life and that’s the way it should be, but when it comes to fiction, I want to pour a few sharp objects into the comfort zone. Our fears are powerful, yet we’ve all got a desire to laugh and be entertained. I could have followed the same path I do now as a scientist, examining how the brain works. Ironically I get much more freedom to experiment as a writer. That’s why I love it.

Carla H. Krueger

Writing is not a numbers game. You should focus more on reaching the hearts of readers and building fans more than publishing a plethora of books that no one may care about.

Selena Haskins

Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.

Carla H. Krueger

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft

Maxine Hong Kingston

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

Carla H. Krueger

It's better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.

Carla H. Krueger

When I write, I write obsessively. I try to pace myself, but some fires are too hot to put out.

Carla H. Krueger

Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere.

Carla H. Krueger

As a writer, the main skill you need is curiosity. As a reader, the main tool you need is open-mindedness.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

Write what you want to write. That's the only advice a writer will ever need.

Chloe Thurlow

You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.

Stewart Stafford

Writing is draining. Every word is like lifting a stone and levering it into place. Your head aches, your muscles ache and every word you conjure up is heavier than the last one.

Chloe Thurlow

Writing isn't something you do because you feel like it. You never feel like it. You write because there's a rat in your brain chewing up the spirals of your DNA and you want to get the words down before they disappear.

Chloe Thurlow

Writing is one way to explore new ideas and by doing so blunt the sense of personal unrest and discontent. Writing assist us recognize, explore, and accept the patent absurdity of life. Writing facilitates thinking; the reagent substances we produce through writing augment our expanding system of ideas. Writing boldly triggers a chain reaction in our philosophical structure and thus writing can operate to transform who we are.

Kilroy J. Oldster

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

Joanna Penn

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

Joanna Penn

Being a writer is not just about typing. It’s also about surviving the rollercoaster of the creative journey.

Joanna Penn

When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.

Joanna Penn

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

Karl Ove Knausgård

Only my characters truly know what's happening - I just hold the pen

Sandra J. Jackson

The Four Stages of Writer’s BlockW.B. Stage I: I want to write but I can’t.W.B. Stage II: I have to write but I can’t. W.B. Stage I: I don’t want to write but I have to.W.B. Stage I: I don’t have time for writing … and, honestly, I don’t feel like writing.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Write what you love. Passion is the key to a good story.

R.M. Donaldson

Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.

Kilroy J. Oldster

All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.

Michael Stutz

A writer seeks to discover a lucid state of creative consciousness uncoiling from a boule of internal disequilibrium and dutifully attempts to bridge that cavernous divide between the known and the unknown and articulate raw truths.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice." -Cheryl L. Ilov, Forever Fit and Flexible: Feeling Fabulous at Fifty and Beyond.

Cheryl L. Ilov

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing…

Harlan Ellison

For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.

Karl Ove Knausgård

I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing I’ll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh.

Troye Sivan

There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel.Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself.

Flannery O'Connor

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.

Ernest Hemingway

When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.

Samuel Colbran

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

Cynthis Ozick

Writing at its best is simply taking dictation from your soul.

Catherine Carrigan

In reading we live hundreds lives, in writing we live thousands of lives.

R.M. Donaldson

Perfectionism is the enemy of the author. There is a difference between good writing habits and perfectionism. The author who displays good writing habits delivers on time. The aspiring author who is prone to perfectionism will likely never fin...

Gudjon Bergmann

If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.

Roman Payne

I believe you can consider yourself a successful prose writer when the number of words you put on a page each day is equal to, or greater than, the number of milligrams of mind-altering chemicals you ingest in that day. (Note: this rule does not apply to poets who write in the short-form. You, my boys and girls, are free as birds!)

Roman Payne

Writing is more about telling other peoples' stories than your own

Carla H. Krueger

Writing is like surfing on a wild sea, in the middle of a moonless night, in a hailstorm, on a deserted island.Yeah... that about sums it up.

Heena Rathore P.

A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure

Karl Wiggins

Every one of the big breakthroughs in the art of literature have possibly started as what many would call a ludicrous or even laughable idea as the writer occasionally balances a routine piece with an investment in the eccentric and untried. Over time, the reward is usually worth the risk

Karl Wiggins

He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.

Jo Baker

I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you,and that you will work with these stories from your life--not someone else's life--water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.

Richard B. Knight

you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

Susan Cain

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead

Warren Adler

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.

Rafael Sabatini

Words are the writer's sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They're our enchantment and our temptation

Karl Wiggins

Discipline, not the Muse, results in productivity. If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all.

Kenneth Atchity

Every writer or wanna-be writer has ideas for books. The problem isn't finding an idea, it's choosing one

Jo Linsdell

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

Tracy Kidder

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.

Baby Halder

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

Gillian Marchenko

Writing is a cerebral journey where the writer molds experience into useful thought capsules and thoughtfully takes recitative inventory of their spiritual depot. The act of personal essay writing is a subtle search to track and discover how a contiguous chain of occurrences links the essayist’s case history of rational and irrational behavior. Writing a person’s life story fosters acceptance of their prior personal failures and serves to open a doorway to living modestly and harmoniously.

Kilroy J. Oldster

When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person’s conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing a personal essay or memoir addresses how a person thinks and behaves in the context of society’s prevailing moral and ethical codes, informal rules, laws, and customs. A self-ethnographer emphasis what he or she considers important regarding how people perceive and categorize the world, their meaning for behavior, how they imagine and explain things, and ascertaining what has meaning for them. Expository writing, a discursive examination of a broad field of subjects, is one method of cohering the dimensions of a person’s emic and etic thoughts and a linked series of memorable events into a unified personal ideology how to live a purposeful life. In cultural anthropology, the emic approach focuses on what people of a local culture think and how they interpret events whereas the etic approach takes a more objective view of how an outsider evaluates the behavior and customs of a culture. Usage of both emic and etic analysis provides the richest description of a cultural or a society in which the personal essayist operates within.

Kilroy J. Oldster

All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.

Carla H. Krueger

...a thriller's toughest trick: carefully assembling everything we think we know, until it reveals the one thing we didn't see coming.

Entertainment Weekly

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Writing Process Quotes - Page 7

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