Quotes About Writing

Rereading parts of your novel while writing is like doubling back at rerunning parts of a marathon midrace.

Don't be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing; the idea of writing a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.

If you spend enough time with your characters, plot simply happens.

There's a book in you that only you can write.

Ray Bradbury said it best: "Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.

In the context of novel writing, this means you should lower the bar from "best-seller" to "would not make someone vomit." Exuberant imperfection encourages you to write uncritically, to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens. In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable. So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low.

fiction writing can be a blast when you set aside debilitating notions of perfection and just dive headlong into the creative process.

here's the thing: However attractive the idea of a writer's retreat may sound, having all day to poke around on a novel actually hampers productivity.

Having an end date for your quest through the noveling unknown is like bringing along a team of jetpack-wearing, entrepreneurial Sherpas.

My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this: Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailors worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what's possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in our mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.

A wearable, writing-enhancing object serves several important purposes. First, it helps you transition from the world of everyday living into the fictional realms you've created. In the former you are a normal person, working a normal job. In the latter, you are an all-powerful deity capable of laying waste to entire cities with a few taps of the keyboard.

Once you stumble across a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime idea for a book, it's hard to treat that story with the irreverent disregard needed to transform it from a great idea into a workable rough draft. When you give yourself just one month to flesh out your concept, you won't have time to feel overly protective of your ideas. And you will therefore stand a much better chance of bringing them to life.

The things that you appreciate as a reader are also the things you'll likely excel at as a writer.

Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.

The best kind of art or writing holds up a mirror to society.

I was just about to begin writing 'Mirror Mirror', within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.

I would be miserable if I went to bed without having written 1,000 words about something.

I just love language. I mean, I love it. I love stage directions. Any opportunity to write. I hadn't written in so long, I get very crazy and miserable. I - it's like not seeing my kids: I can't do it for very long.

I'm never more miserable than when I write, and never more happy than having finished and having it sitting in front of me.

I love writing but it's a real pain. It's a miserable process - very satisfying but very miserable.

I haven't done much rereading or rewatching stuff I've written over the years, but I did look at 'Misery' before I started the play. I liked it. Not much I would change.

The reason I write romance is that I like happy endings. The idea, you know, 'It's not literature unless is ends badly,' and I really don't like that. There's enough misery and bad things happening in the world.

For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself that by setting one foot in front of the other, I will eventually make my way out of the desert.

I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.