novel-writing

During a conversation, listening is as powerful as loving.

State first, subject second, statesman last.

No tricks, no tools, but talent makes a task truly top class.

Respect cannot be inherited, respect is the result of right actions.

Anger gets you into trouble, ego keeps you in trouble.

Arrogant men with knowledge make more noise from their mouth than making a sense from their mind.

With discipline, you can lose weight, you can excel in work, you can win the war.

Politeness is the first thing people lose once they get the power.

If you can't impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.

As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Michael Palin : "I am sorry to interrupt you there Dennis, but he's crossed it out. Thomas Hardy here on the first day of his new novel has crossed out the only word he has written so far and he is gazing off into space. Ohh! Oh dear he's signed his name again."Graham Chapman: "It looks like Tess of the D'Urbervilles all over again."- Matching Tie and Handkerchief, "Novel Writing

Mostly writing requires massive dedication, a whole lot of time spent alone, way too much sitting, countless hours spent thinking hard, and unending and occasionally painful dedication to forming ideas and laboring over the production of sentences, paragraphs, scenes, dialogue, punctuation, and all the elements that go into writing a novel, a play, a screenplay, or a poem. When we're not writing, we're thinking, plotting, imagining, or editing, which can be far more tedious than cranking out first drafts.--Fire Up Your Writing Brain

I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself.

When wealth goes only happiness goes, when health goes even the hope goes.

Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.

Writing a novel is like traveling the universe on foot.

With the right tools, you can write anything ...

I was told, and indeed I saw several examples, that neither time nor place was much minded, and that I might hazard being equally careless of chronology and geography; but I piqued myself on having studied Aristotle, and scrupulously attended to the probabilities of time and place.