The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.

Kilroy J. Oldster

We become the product of our recurrent thoughts. Writing is one method of explicating upon our thoughts, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas, and editing our fragmented beliefs.

Kilroy J. Oldster

All forms of writing are an act of conception; writing must lead to creation. Each time that we write, we begin again. Writing is an act of self-affirmation. Each time that we place our thoughts onto paper, we receive a new opportunity to claim our reality. Writing is also an act of explication and deconstruction. Writing empowers us to shape and modify our fiery constitutions. Writing allows us to explore the essential ingredients that lead to a life of serenity by exhibiting compassion, love, patience, generosity, and forgiveness.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn't move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer.

Arthur Hailey

See the world anew and write down the bones of it.

A.D. Sams

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

Natalie Goldberg

I’ve realized the most effective writing and living are done when we are willing to be vulnerable. I think we spend most of our lives trying to cover up our insecurities.

Katie Kiesler

I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.

Slash Coleman

Love is the bee that carries the pollen from one heart to another.

Slash Coleman

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

Slash Coleman

Life is a book that someone else is reading—and you, a key character—hence the need for continual conflict and resolution. We can't have any boring books.

Richelle E. Goodrich

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

Sara Sheridan

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

Dan Brown

I don’t existmetal pressed to pagesspilling blood, inkin vein each thought ragesSunlight shootingthrough a forest of pinesblack top windingand yellow dotted linesI am not hereonly a deep aching,a lightning flashand a tree trunk breakingSheets once alive covered in a deep redmark the presentbut I am not yet deadNothing is hereonly the rain and mistfresh air and soilI do not need to exist.

Abby Musgrove

And so I've written everything down, too afraid of my demons and what they may say, the doubt that eats at me from the inside. Too afraid that I'll forget and it'll all be a madwoman's dream.

Nadège Richards

Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic.

Criss Jami

Read! Write! Imagine! Create! Love! Live!

Helen Deakin

Exist with me. We'd do so beautifully.

Alaska Gold

Do you think maybe your writing isn't going anymore because you're unhappy? Because you're not living the life you could? A life worth writing about? You must know that cliche-write what you know-but what do you know, Bree, when you shut the world out?

Holly Bourne

Learning is essential for living the life you love.

A.D. Posey

The only way to survive after death is by breathing life into the universe before death.

Michael Bassey Johnson

We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

And this is what being an artist means, being a poet? To sacrifice yourself for your art, sacrifice your heart for your art, because it’s only through something broken that something beautiful can grow.

Charlotte Eriksson

Writing can be a source of strength-Wang Liang

Xinran

I write to give strength to my spirit.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Vulnerability has a strength of its own.

William Zinsser

Whoever suffers knows the strength of suffering.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Audiences will admire your character’s strength but connect with them through their weakness.

Don Roff

But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Writing is a solitary existence, especially if you forget to chat to your friends – sorry, I meant characters.

Carla H. Krueger

A writer sets up his own amazing experiment: his work of fiction.

Eric Maisel Ph.D.

You -have- to love your monster.

Philippa Dowding

Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience.

Stewart Stafford

What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be--not seem--outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined--as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one’s own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more.

James Baldwin

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

James Baldwin

Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.

Zack Love

I’m just not ready to give myself up, Sammy. I mean, there’s something perfect about virginity, and I haven’t found someone who deserves to take that perfection from me…”“You’re loco, Carlos. Insane. Totally crazy… Most guys think they’re imperfect for still being virgins past the age of seventeen.

Zack Love

As for my being a horror writer, I actually think horror is a very conservative genre. The horror comes when you do something wrong--when you challenge religion or society or nature--and then you must pay. I personally consider myself a radical, but I publish conservative material. That's quite a paradox.

John Coyne

Life in society is when everyone is there and no one is present. Life in society is when everyone obeys what no one wants. Writing is a way of escaping this impoverishment, a variation on solitude like love or gambling – a principle of insubordination, a virtue of childhood.

Christian Bobin

public display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can really write from a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power.

Dodie Bellamy

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.

Bell Hooks

--All that because Promethea is a woman? All this uproar, this trembling, this resistance?--Yes. No. Y-Yes...Naynayno. Whynoyes.Yes, Promethea is a woman.Yes, but "because is a woman," that is not important.But no it precisely its not being important that is so important.

Hélène Cixous

Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I'm hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he'll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I'm hoping he'll look at women as he does at men--that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex.

Susan Fletcher

Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn’t quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you’ll wake up and want something else, and you’ll have to choose. Because the other thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you’re left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no more pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality. I tried and failed to be a character in a story somebody else had written for me. What concerns me now is the creation of new narratives, the opening of space in the collective imagination for women who have not been permitted such space before, for women who don’t exist to please, to delight, to attract men, for women who have more on our minds. Writing is a different kind of magic, and everyone knows what happens to women who do their own magic - but it’s a risk you have to take.

Laurie Penny

I am willing to make people uncomfortable so that my daughter doesn't have to!

Kelly Sue DeConnick

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.

Gloria Steinem

Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding.

Kate Millett

In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don't follow this code become unlikable. Critics who criticize a character's unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.

Roxanne Gay

I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.

Pat Conroy

And, why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great -that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly". Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because, you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty -so as to be forgiven; or to forgot, to bury it until next time.

Hélène Cixous

I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.

Dorothy Allison

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

Virginia Woolf

I want characters to do bad things and get away with their misdeeds. I want characters to think ugly thoughts and make ugly decisions. I want characters to make mistakes and put themselves first without apologizing for it.

Roxane Gay

People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

Michelle M. Pillow

...I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do...

John Geddes

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

Henry James

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good.

David Foster Wallace

I heart my job. I get to make things up for a living.

Michelle M. Pillow

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Writing Quotes - Page 48

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