writing-process

Start with a word. A word leads to a sentence, which leads to a paragraph, which leads to a chapter, which leads to a manuscript, which leads to a book..... just start with a word!

Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn__ easy, but it__ fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra__hey__l take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I__ too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I__ syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!"' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear.

Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that__ one-third of a triathlon (authoring, publishing, and entrepreneuring).

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

Most__ut not all__f the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn__ want to be anyone__ employee if it interfered with their writing. They were halfway or all the way outside the mainstream and were often not interested in becoming part of the burgeoning corporate society. They had more freedom than your average American.

There__ a difference between the __rt_ of writing and the __raft_ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.

This isn__ a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It__ a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it__ printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.

Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.

I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It__ tradition and form__ear of the unknown__riving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can hearwhen I stand alonein the middle of an art show_.

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules...

If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will.

Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?