writing-craft

How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be 'and,' 'the,' and 'I,' and 'it,' and so on, and there's a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you.

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and . . . read.But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you__e become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

I don__ just want a gripping story line. I shoot for the three dimensional literary Braille to a silent Scorsese movie

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug._ Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

I don__ know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I__ telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.

I never really feel that I__ stuck. I actually think that people are never stuck, there__ no such thing as writers block, I think that theres terror that can silence you. But if you can think of it as a dynamic thing I mean a writers block, it__ a paralysis an immobility and the thing that has immobilized you is a very powerful force. Immobility is itself an act, it__ a choice. It can sometimes take as much energy to remain immobile as it does to be mobile. And if you think of it in a dynamic way then it__ freeze you from the sense that at some point your talent will simply abandon you and you__e just a vacant shell with nothing to say, I don__ think that ever really happens. But I think that terror, bad experience, trauma and so on can absolutely silence you.

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.

It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.

While I'm writing, I'm far away;and when I come back, I've gone.

This is important to writing. . . that is, it is important to my own writing. This. . . is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played in it, dug in it, planted in it, and walked over it. It is where I began. And all my writing begins with a landscape such as this. A place.

Begin your writing, fiction or article, where the action begins. This action can be internal (e.g., an important insight or personal decision) or external (e.g., a murder or calamity). Begin too early, you lose your reader. Begin too late, you lose your story.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.