writing-process

...I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...

I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.

I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will probably be nonexistant a 100 years later, but - you know - i have no idea what else to do. I like creating. What else can i do?

There's an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer's mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over again until it is right--all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.

You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

...the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...

...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...

... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write.

Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.

Writing is like bungee jumping for the soul...you take a deep breath, plunge into the abyss and hope the rope tethering you to the real world doesn't snap.

Writing had never become routine for him, but remained a constant surprise. He was always surprised at how much fun it was, once it all got moving. And never failed to be surprised at how bloody hard it was. It was like having an intense, frustrating love affair with a capricious, gorgeous, and often mean-spirited woman.He loved every moment of it.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky...more will want to do the former than the latter.