Quotes about writing-process

I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision a complex of emotions raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.

Process is nothing erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over I hope birds ate the crumbs I hope you will toss it all and not look back.

No writer ever puts into words which he or she thinks is unnecessary learning how to discover that some are is one of the chief challenges in learning to write.

I suppose I had some meaning when I wrote it I believe I understood it then.

A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.

The artist Paul Klee described drawing a picture as taking a line for a walk. I have borrowed his words to explain my approach to writing when I write a novel it is like I am taking a thought for a walk.

Your experiences are the foundation for your story your imagination takes it from there.

Sometimes a fresh perspective is all you need to get a second wind on the revision process. Try viewing your material on a different medium it will shed a new light on the inconsistencies in the dark.

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink that will cure you of persiflage!

Some writers need to sink in order to feel what their characters feel in order to write their characters with the truest feeling possible. Those closest to those writers end up feeling the effects of that process. It takes a strong person to be with an emphatic writer.

The brain is like a muscle books are the diet and writing is the workout.

Life is sacred story.

I was always observing. Even while talking, living, going through every motion, I was watching myself and the situation. That's a writer. Always observing.

After finishing 1st draft of a novel, I have the characters, dialogue, scenes, and a plotline. I used to think this meant I knew where the story was going, and what the book was about.I have learned over the years, this ain’t so.As I work through its 2nd draft, characters start to nudge each other. The story itself takes its first soft and shallow breath, and one could imagine he hears a little bit of a heartbeat. Passions deepen, and emotional threads start to weave through what had earlier jus

We derive insightful perception by observing and studying, comparing and contrasting. Without investigating why we prefer the veil of life to the cloak of death and without considering how to create dangerously, live honorably, and die gloriously without remorse and regret, we risk dissipating what precious little shelf life our brittle humanity grants us.

The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.

There is something way more bigger than just being a writer. Being a writer doesn’t mean you just write about things because you want that. It means that you are capable to feel this world and every emotion deepest than you can, and you’re just sharing that with people all around the world. It means that there is something common between infinity and writing. Writing makes me feel immortal. You just can’t stop, cause there are endless words inside of you…

Writing is an art and a skill that can be developed

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.

Reflective writing produces distinct rewards. A writer does not claim to live exclusively in the moment. A pensive writer retreats into oneself in noble attempt to meld memory, thought, faith, doubt, and other strong emotions into thought capsules while exploring the inscrutable web of creation.

What importance should be given to details, in developing a subject?--Remorselessly sacrifice everything that does not contribute to clarity, verisimilitude, and effect.Accentuate everything that sets the main idea in relief, so that the impression be colourful, picturesque. It's sufficient that the rest be in its proper place, but in half-tone. That is what gives to style, as to painting, unity, perspective, and effect.- Constantin Georges Romain Héger, teacher to Charlotte Brontë

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 and

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.

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

Writing is like daydreaming through your fingers.

Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.

I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.' And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. … It’s like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It’s like, ‘Um, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just…I have to…It’s super important for my law!

we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are.

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.

...it's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...

Don't think too much. There'll be time to think later. Analysis won't help. You're chiseling now. You're passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There's something there. It isn't your business yet to know whether it's going to be prize-worthy someday, or whether it will gather dust in a drawer. Now you've carved the tree. You've chiseled the marbled. You've begun.

I know it's difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.

Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.

I am swimming in a sea of words, attempting to keep my head above water.

Life baffles me most days. Maybe that's why I write. To try and make sense of it all.

I have written until I fell asleep with my computer on my lap. That can't be normal.

I'm not gonna lie...sometimes this whole writing thing is a lonely business.

Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days...it will demand absolutely everything of you.

When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete...you feel as if you could do anything.

Give all that you can. No more. No less. Every. Single. Day.

A writer writes. There are no exceptions to this reality. No excuses. Stop wasting time talking about your stories and get them on paper.

If you have a story inside you but don't know where to start, look within and write from the heart, for the heart will never steer you wrong.

And I've learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity.

Don't be afraid of what you're creating.

Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.

Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book.

The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review.

Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theore

Foreword: Life is tension or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are

...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

I don't write to chase away my demons ~I wield my pen as a weapon...calling those bastards to war!

Deadlines help me, but my muse hates them. My muse functions in fits and starts, and tends to take very long vacations. Deadlines are like a hot poker to his ass. They force us both to sit down and write, which is what it takes to do this.

The thing I've learned is that thinking is not writing.

The night before a deadline, I usually am in desperate need of a back rub. And new wrists. And candy. And little mice to secretly finish the job while I am sleeping.

Writing a memoir is a holistic method of learning and healing by placing responsibility for personal transformation on the spiritual authority of the self. Writing a person’s life story is useful to gain a comprehensive understanding regarding a person’s maturation, distinctive stages of personal development, and the influences provided by their family and society. The writing processes also serves as a catharsis for painful personal events that a person seeks to integrate into their transmuting

The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can't count on it to be there just because you've made some space for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear. You tell yourself you can't write in the middle of your daily life, with all its distractions and commitments, and when you finally clear the decks, light off for someplace scenic or at least private, you sit there completely paralyzed. You have devoted yourself to writing, but it has not returned your devotion. If writing

I'm not talented or gifted. I'm a committed, meticulous workaholic. The only reason I succeed is because I refuse to fail.

[When asked for her advice to aspiring writers] Run! Just kidding. Sort of. Really, I think the best advice I can give is to wait for the book that compels you to write it-- the one that you eat, sleep, and breathe. If you try to force yourself to create an epic story, you will feel the ensuing drudgery quite acutely-- and worse, your readers will feel it too. Conversely, if you wait for the book that won't leave you alone until you finish it, your readers will feel that energy and it will make

If you have a story to tell, put it out there. Get the thing done. No excuses. No procrastinating. No apologies. It will never be as good as you want it to be, so forget about perfection. Just be satisfied that you've done the best work you can do at this stage in your life as an author. Then roll the rocket onto the launch pad and fire it off. After that, write another story. Always keep going. Move fast. Stay one step ahead of the forces of distraction and self-doubt. Love your characters enou

To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutc

Writing is daydreaming with ink.

Inspiration for my short stories grows from a psychic kernel, a vision of some sort or an eccentric, colorful dream.

So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody’s memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language.

Today I will find something beautiful.Delicate pink blossoms on a cherry tree.The dove resting near the lemon buds.Sunbeams smiling from sky to earth.Smiling on me."Creating" in BREATHE IN

...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...

Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienced, and the species' capacity to revert, to run backward -especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well - is extremely strong in all of us, quite irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don't do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present - for, in other w

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that

To find the courage to keep writing after constant failure is awesomeness. Winning is eminent.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

On the Writing Process:"When in doubt, take it out.,

Sometimes when I prepare to write, I feel the same sensation wash over me as if my toes were curling over the brink of a high cliff, my gaze peering downward into a dark pond, and I anxiously wonder, will the water prove deep enough? Will my words be satisfactory?

The biggest thing for aspiring writers I would say is that writing is hard work. You can’t sustain the fantasy that it should somehow be otherwise for you because you are more special or more committed than other aspiring writers. You aren’t sitting down to be entertained by the gods or to entertain yourself. At times it can be a thrill and it feels more like play, but we are easily deceived by whatever pleasures or rewards writing can offer. Exhilarating work is still work. Is it work, or is it

The irony of a writer is he/she craves privacy to pen words that crave the public.

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and "fall into a vortex" as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Her "scribbling suit" consisted of a black woollen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to t

The author is impacted by a hidden insistence that takes the shape of different combinations each time adifferent text is produced but the underlying problem remains the same for him.

Letters orchestrated into a song of words create the symphony of a novel.

Laughing in my ear is a muse amused by how I paint her whims on paper with silly words.

Yeah, episodic doesn't work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it's just narrative shit.

My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero.

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

If we eliminate the word "writer", if we just go back to writing as an act of listening and naming what we hear, some of the rules dissappear. There is an organic shape, a form-coming-into-form that is inherent in the thing we are observing, listening to, and trying to put on the page. It has rules of its own that it will reveal to us if we listen with attention. Shape does not need to be imposed. Shape is a part of what we are listening to. When we just let ourselves write, we get it "right".

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.

I personally believe that one learns to write by writing.

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!

...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself...

The "if I had time" lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born - without the luxury of time.

Writing is simply another means for truth to escape, besides crawling out the hole it’s eaten in the author’s belly.

On a related note, I think for many of us, the first step in becoming a good writer is to write crap. In all seriousness, none of us are born knowing how to write. Almost all of us will produce a lot of really lousy stories before we start to get good. (Not all of us will choose to publish those lousy stories, but that's a whole separate discussion...)

...ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the crowding passive voice sentences.

Writing Tip:Don't let the "writing rules" bog you down when you're writing the first draft; they don't matter when you're writing the story, only when you're editing the story.

I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome" first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternati

...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...

...the most beautiful things don't always make you happy - often they make you weep...

Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes out of it.

Write your own part. It's the only way I've ever gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands. It forces you to think about what your strengths really are, and once you find them, you can showcase them, and nobody can stop you.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting