Quotes About Writing

Question marks were shaped like a hook for a reason...

On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.

The Muse is not real. Relying on the Muse is like leaning on a crutch made of playing cards.

Your first draft can and should look like a fucking warzone. That's okay. Don't sweat it, because you survived. Put differently, that first draft of yours has permission to suck. Go forth and care not.

Do that and the carbs will only drag you down, make you mentally foggy. Stick with protein while writing. By the way, bacon is protein. Just saying.

Writers are goofy-headed moon-units.

Writers and actors have some creative ground in common, and so when you're writing a scene and hoping to convey a mood it's not the worst idea to try to put that mood into your headspace -- feel it, if only a little. I'm not saying you have to kill a kitten or punch your mother to feel something -- I just mean, stir up the memory of certain emotions if not the emotion itself. Same way an actor might think about a sad moment to conjure tears on-camera. 23.

Writing is the act of creation. Put words on a page, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to seven-book epic fantasy cycles with books so heavy you could choke a hippo. But don't give writing too much power, either. A wizard controls his magic; it doesn't control him.

exposure is not a measurable resource. If someone asks you to write for exposure, ask them how much exposure. Like, have them measure it. Will it be ten picameters of exposure? I usually ask at least seven nanoliters' worth. If they can prove it, fuck yeah, great. But exposure is a hard thing to prove. Let me utter my refrain yet again: Writers, like hikers, can die from exposure.

Learn from your existence and borrow things from your day to day. Have adventures. Take risks. Put yourself into your fiction. Because life offers a kind of writing advice you just can't read about -- it's something only you can experience.

You're not tasked with desalinating an ocean or training a komodo dragon to cure ebola. I'm saying, sludge yourself into the ass receptacle and peck keyboard keys like a hungry chicken until it makes words. Or pick up one of the tools used by our distant ancestors -- it is a tube filled with the liquid black souls of all the animals we've made extinct -- and use this pen as a scribe would to etch scribbly heretical word-shapes onto dead tree pulp.

Gravel popped like popcorn under

Because I know what it's like to pour your heart and soul into a book, day after day after day, when it comes to the work of other authors, I either give them five stars -- or say nothing! I simply can't bring myself to do anything else.

Being a writer means crying over the sad parts, even though you already know it's going to be okay.

So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

Would it insult you if I used your alphabet? I don't think I could start from scratch.

Writing is a journey with no maps, no ending, no guides (except charlatans) and often no point. Still we do it.

I will treat you with my knife the way you've treated my pages with your merciless eyes. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.

I don't plot or outline, though I may take a few notes here and there, instead I let my dream world fill up each night with a segment of the story. I do this without worrying about it, or trying to force it, and when I wake up the dream bag is full, and I can go to my writing desk, and dream all over the page.

I begin. I write a draft without ever looking back. Without ever touching what's gone before. Because I think it will be shit, so I daren't look back. I write a draft. I start again. I have the text when I start the second draft and then I do the same thing a third time. - To Linda L. Richards, The January Interview

As much as you feel as though you need to find some relevant bit of information for your story to work, research distracts from your writing and inevitably leads you down a rabbit hole of websites and articles and, more than likely, the temptation of checking your email or your Facebook profile or the baseball scores on ESPN.