writing-craft

Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.

Don__ write what you know__hat you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you__nd interests you deeply__nd your readers will catch fire at your words.

God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.

The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.

My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess.

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable

Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick__hen it__ personal. The bad guy isn__ just the __ad guy_ anymore, he__ the BAD GUY!

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts.

Writer's block? I've never heard of a plumber complain about plumber's block.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.