Quotes about on-writing

A novel rough draft is like bread dough you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.

All great literature is one of two stories a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand I teach in order to learn

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker they need it to take the edge off.

We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say "Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day" or "Annie seemed particularly happy that day."If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win.

I think the best thing about being a writer is getting to dream. It's constantly viewing life through the "what if?" lens.

Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.

Either give it your all or don't even try!

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

For me, all writing -- storytelling and style -- gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

Writing on dark themes is not as easy as one might think; you have to live the worst and the most terrifying nightmares, again and again, till they consume you entirely and become an inseparable part of you that you start dreading.

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

1. Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor.2. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor.3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.4. Pick one — fame or delight.5. The archer knows the target. The poet knows the wastebasket.6. Cunning and excess are your friends.7. TV and liquor are your enemies.8. Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3 a.m.9. You’re done when the crows sing.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.

I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the day's work--and not with some enjoyment.

The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.

The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling f

Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.

Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.

...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit - a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit - a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost," while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.

Fruition-Think of writing as a harvest.You till the ground.Plant.Water.Wait.Apple trees take years to bear fruit.Harvest.Clean.Process.Then you have apple pie.

When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story.

The truth is that most writers are needy.

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.

A novel, or so-called “fiction,” if deeply researched and conscientiously written, might well contain as much truth as a high-school history textbook approved by a state board of education. But having been designated “historical fiction” by its publisher, it is presumed to be less reliably true than that textbook. If fiction were defined as “the opposite of truth,” then much of the content of many approved historical textbooks could be called “historical fiction.”But fiction is not the opposite

my own definition of bad historical fiction hits these points:It fails to transport the reader to a former time.It fails to put the reader in another place.It fails to bring characters to life.It fails to make the reader shiver, sweat, sniffle, sneer, snarl, weep, laugh, gag, ache, hunger, wince, yearn, lust, lose sleep, empathize, hate, or need to go potty.It seems dubious.It has characters who seem too good or too bad to be true.It has anachronisms.It has clichés and stereotypes.Its writing st

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire specialized college education on the society in which your story takes place, because all sorts of things were happening that you need to understand before you can even begin to tell a story in that milieu.

Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull. This wonderful and terrible word means “dead hand.” Its definition is: “The influence of the past regarded as controlling the present.” (It is also used as a legal term with the same basic meaning.

If you don't know what those old occupations were, how they were done, and how they interacted with the passersby, you're not prepared to write a historical novel. A historical figure doesn't pass through a blank countryside. That means you, the novelist, must learn by research what the whole place was like in those times. As much as you can, you must be like someone who has lived there, because you're going to be not just the storyteller but also the tour guide taking your readers through the p

Some writers don't believe they're ready to begin writing the story until they've finished all the research they can think of to do — until they're sure of everything. That's a logical approach, of course. The more factual knowledge, the less likelihood you'll have to throw out a lot of glorious prose when you find out that something you assumed to be true wasn't.But one problem with delaying your start until the research is all done is that the research is never all done.

Lucia Robson's facts can be trusted if, say, you're a teacher assigning her novels as supplemental reading in a history class. “Researching as meticulously as a historian is not an obligation but a necessity,” she tells me. “But I research differently from most historians. I'm looking for details of daily life of the period that might not be important to someone tightly focused on certain events and individuals. Novelists do take conscious liberties by depicting not only what people did but tryi

Most historical accounts were written by fallible scholars, using incomplete or biased resource materials; written through the scholars' own conscious or unconscious predilections; published by textbook or printing companies that have a stake in maintaining a certain set of beliefs; subtly influenced by entities of government and society — national administrations, state education departments, local school boards, etcetera — that also wish to maintain certain sets of beliefs. To be blunt about i

In my long career in this historical fiction business, though, I've found that the most effective storytelling concept is this: Once upon a time it was now.That has become my credo and my method as a longtime historical novelist.It's quite simple, if you see as Janus sees:Today is now.Yesterday was now.Tomorrow will be now.Three hundred years ago, the eighteenth century was now.You, as a historical novelist, can make any time now by taking your reader into that time. Once you grasp that, the res

Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. … All those things.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.

Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit.

I learn my world through writing.

I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences.

Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.

But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small

But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer to reach for anything but the nearest cliche'. "Shouldered his way," "only to be met," "crashing into his face," "waging a lonely war," "corruption that is rife," "sending shock waves," "New York's finest," - these dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look. We are in the hands of a hack,

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't be careful enough.

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't been careful enough

There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.

I write because I am a writer, not because I want to get anything out of it.

My writing, it’s my way of making sense of everything. My way to feel whole. May I never be complete and may I never feel content – please, let me always have the need, always have the urge to write. 

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character study; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.

I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.

I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences. Like vivid, rainbow metallic skin cells on the wings of a fragile butterfly, it is how you touch and reveal those inner parts of yourself, without damaging the psyche, that determines whether the beauty is experienced and expressed and shared with others or, in fact, becomes the death of the self and Soul and psyche. I hope that I capture something in my work tha

When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.

Stories. Character. Dialouge. Entire worlds created on the page. Worlds that could sweep you away or frighten you, make you laugh or cry. Worlds that allowed you to escape to another country or time. Worlds built piece by piece of ink and punctuation.

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps AllREALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time

I would write:"The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam."Or:"The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream.""The old man huddled in the dark doorway, his bony face lit by the burning yellow in the windows of distant skycrapers."My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten t

Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .

Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product.

Words writers choose are like a glimmering reflection into our souls.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom . .

How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line—how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined—well, a good poem.

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words ar

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written., 8 September 1935)

V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.