writing-process

There are three difficulties in authorship: _ to write anything worth publishing - to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it. _ Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]

If you don__ make time for writing, writing won__ make time for you.

When we write from the inside out rather than the outside in, when we write about what most concerns us rather than about what we feel might sell, we often write so well and so persuasively that the market responds to our efforts.

To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don't come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated. But it's not a question of the will, it is a mechanism I can set in motion or not, like scratching my nose or doing a backward roll.

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.

...he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to story that he finally couldn't write it...When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

Writing is easy. Saying something that would make a difference is the task.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

Writing is hard work. Attempting to write a decent story is friggin exhausting!

Rather than feeling that every moment you__e got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.

Writings are thoughts in a defined moment.

Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.

I do not put in long hours at the keys - or very seldom. Instead, I snatch time. I write in the crannies of my life.

The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.

And now, I have another good reason to speed up my baby narratives to make my author's profile appear more respectable.