writing-craft

A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure

I should be writing ...

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

A good part of the physical attraction [between the hero and heroine of a romance novel] comes to life during these exchanges as well, since language creates a meeting of the minds. I have long thought that these lines of dialogue carve out the lines of the central love relationship. The dialogue between the hero and heroine creates the central shape of the story. It is the verbal sculpture.

Words are the writer's sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They're our enchantment and our temptation

Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.

Every artist needs canvass, mine just happens to be Microsoft Word and a Thesaurus.

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

She logged in and read a few of her old posts, smiling at the issues she had raged about and shaking her head at how some of the rants now seemed pretentious and judgmental. She had grown so much without even realizing she had. Mythili typed out the draft, spicing it up subtly and after a last read, she published it. Admiring the brand new post on her main page, she realized she missed writing. She had barely written anything since her last by-line. Typing this out, she felt like she was back with a long-lost friend who understood her. It was like snuggling up in a warm blanket when a thunderstorm raged outside.

Storytellers don't show, they tell. I'm sticking with that.

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.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three

Authors - trust in your vision.

*Persistence is more important than perfection. If at first you don__ succeed, it doesn__ matter as long as you always try, try again; *Small improvements, made consistently, add up; *You cannot fail unless you quit. What most people call failures are merely unsuccessful experiments. Failures are bumps on the road as long as your story remains a work in progress; *You can always do better with what you already have - and often, it__ much smarter to find ways to do so than to invest time and money trying something entirely new as your next one sure thing; *And most importantly, being good doesn__ matter nearly as much as being slightly better than yesterday.

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul.

...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__ move the story forward, the crowding passive voice sentences.

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...)

The moment I realize I just stayed up until five in the morning writing is that moment I know I am meant to be a writer.