writing-craft

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth__ ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing--and reading--is a solitary business. And it__ good to know I__ not alone.

Real writers write. Period. No, the muse does not come to visit everyday. She__ a lazy, precocious flirt. You cannot get into the habit of being __n the mood_ to write. No writer on Earth is in the mood to write everyday, but the good ones do it anyway. They fight through their fatigue, their stress, their doubt, and they write. They get the words on the page. Period. So stop waiting for your muse. Trust me, she sleeps around.

Replace your old books with the book you've always wanted to write.

Replace your old books with the books you__e always wanted to write.

Can we all pause a moment to appreciate the artistry of that sentence? "Sitting casually on the floor, a guard sat..." That's freaking art right there! Someone nominate this thing for the Hugo Award already!

I just thought, __ait a minute, if I__ going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.' And this is the least quiet place I__e ever been in my life. _ It__ like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It__ like, __m, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just_I have to_It__ super important for my law!

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book.

...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.