Quotes About Writing

If we are interested in a writing life - as opposed to a writing career - then we are in it for the process and not the product - for the body of work and not for the quick hit of one well-realised piece.

Pages must be done longhand. The computer is fast—too fast for our purposes. Writing by computer gets you speed but not depth. Writing by computer is like driving a car at 85 mph. Everything is a blur. "Oh, my God, was that my exit?" Writing by hand is like going 35 mph. "Oh, look, here comes my exit. And look, it has a Sonoco station and a convenience store.

Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore—does that ruin the romance?

The success of Morning Pages hinges on our doing them as close to awakening as we can.

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.

us a place to vent and a place to dream. They are intended for no eyes but our own. Virginia

Boredom is just "What's the use?" in disguise. And "What's the use?" is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page. THE ARTIST DATE The other basic tool of The Artist's Way may strike you as a nontool, a diversion.

Writing, as we are taught to do it, becomes an antihuman activity. We are forever editing, leaving out the details that might not be pertinent. We are trained to self-doubt, to self-scrutiny in the place of self-expression.

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written. I believe that as I have an impulse to create, the something I want to create has an impulse to want to be born. My job, then, is to show up on the page and let that something move

We procrastinate because we think we must write our entire project. But to break procrastination, we need only write our first thought. Our second, third, and fourth thoughts follow. Soon we are writing, and procrastination is a thing of our past.

The morning pages will teach you to stop judging and just let yourself write. So what if you're tired, crabby, distracted, stressed? Your artist is a child and it needs to be fed. Morning pages feed your artist child. So write your morning pages.

When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us.

The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you've already got.

If only we could give ourselves permission to write "badly," so many of us would write very well indeed.

For me, writing is like a good pair of pajamas -- comfortable. In our culture, writing is more often costumed up in a military outfit. We want our sentences to march in neat little rows, like well-behaved boarding-school children.

If we let ourselves notice, writing feels collaborative. It is a dance between reality and us as an observer.

We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't ... your mood doesn't really matter. Some of the best creative work gets done on the days when you feel that everything you are doing is just plain junk ... stop judging yourself and just let yourself write.

Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft.

Aiming for that, I learned to write setting judgment aside and save a polish for later. I called this new, freer writing "laying track." For the first time I gave myself emotional permission to do rough drafts and for those rough drafts to be, well, rough.

Writing is making choices, and the choices we make can be generic, which will cost us our reader's faith, or specific, which will gain our reader's trust. Detail allows us to communicate precisely what we mean.

Las páginas están concebidas para que nos familiaricemos simplemente con el acto de mover la mano a través del papel y volcar en él todo aquello que te pasa por la cabeza, sea lo que sea. Incluiremos todo, por nimio, tonto, estúpido o raro que pueda parecer.

Todos aquellos enfados, quejas, miserias que vuelcas al papel por las mañanas son precisamente las cosas que se interponen entre tú y tu creatividad

I learned to just show up to the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping ... I didn't have to be in the mood ... Good, bad? None of my business. I wasn't doing it.

When we love our writing, we find time for it. The trick to finding writing time, then, is to write from love and not with an eye to product.