Writing Quotes - Page 46

Sometimes, as much as writing saves one’s own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another’s. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the kind a soul needs.

There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can't get a good story out of it.

The most important advice I can offer is that writing is a craft that you can learn by practicing. If you keep writing, you will improve.

If I don't have an outlet in which to express myself...throug h songwriting or other mediums...I get a bit jittery.

In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.

As one of my creative writing professors once said, there are only seven plots. What makes those plots different is how you handle them, your voice, your style, and your way of thinking. That’s all. People can mimic your style, but they can never achieve your unique point of view.

Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.

If instituted, the TPP's IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you're ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

Engrave this in your brain: EVERY WRITER GETS REJECTED. You will be no different.

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.

That's the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It's just the same enemy - blank paper.

Writing has always been my go-to form of expression. Whenever I was going through something as a kid, I would write it down and I would turn it into a poem.

The only time I know that something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

Believe in yourself and in your own voice, because there will be times in this business when you will be the only one who does. Take heart from the knowledge that an author with a strong voice will often have trouble at the start of his or her career because strong,distinctive voices sometimes make editors nervous. But in the end, only the strong survive.

The mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas and emotions have ideas and emotions more profound than the rest of us. It isn't so. The ability to express is a special gift with a special craft to support it and is spread fairly equally among the profound, the shallow, and the mediocre.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.

Poetry is perfect verbs hunting for elusive nouns.