Quotes About Writing

To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up?

Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, "I've always been a believer that if I've got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.

In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an advertisement promoting the correspondence music course offered by the U.S. School of Music. Caples had no advertising experience, but he was a natural. He sat at his typewriter and pecked out the most famous headline in print-advertising history: "They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano. . .But When I Started to Play!

Each word she'd set down in the journals was a gift and a wound.

He told me that visions of all he needed to write came to him at the oddest moments, forcing him to abandon other activities and write them down.

I think that most writers who are trying to write important and difficult books are in many ways putting their own humanity into question. Sometimes the journey is finding out where you stand in relationship to your own humanity and to the humanity of others.

I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

I truly believe that writing is a continuum--so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better.

Actually, come to think of it, you also should resist the temptation to share your work-in-progress with yourself as well. Rereading parts of your first draft while writing is like doubling back and rerunning portions of a marathon midrace.

I tend to celebrate crossing over with a meditative ceremony where I print the book out and neatly stack its pages on the floor. When everything has been properly laid out, I take a few steps back from the work, close my eyes, and offer up my thanks to the writing powers for another bountiful harvest. At which point, I get a running start and dive headlong into my word-pile, rolling around and snorting like a pig. And then I fall asleep for three days. How you celebrate is up to you. But

Despite what you may have learned last month, sustained writing is best accomplished as part of a balanced lifestyle, one that includes things like grocery shopping and speaking in complete sentences with your significant other. No

Instead, we spent our downtime prodding at lifeless characters and wondering how long a human body could subsist on a diet of ramen and Coke before liver function ceased entirely.

Yes, there is something a little defeatist about accepting one's slacking ways rather than trying to fix them. That's a worry, though, for another month. The healthiest, most productive approach to writing is to acknowledge your weak spots early on, and build a writing plan that plays to your strengths and works around your liabilities.

Our son Barney was about to be born when I started, [this book] and will start school about the time this is going to press. When I told him I was a writer and not a firefighter, he said:" but writers don't do anything.

The idea itself is the ten percent inspiration; the hammering it into a viable, successful, memorable story is the ninety percent perspiration that follows.

I regret that [my grandfather] never saw the book. i had finished the third draft of what turned out to be five, but I had decided to wait until the novel was perfect before I gave it to him to read. What a fool I am. If you will forgive the one piece of advice a writer is qualified to give: never be afraid of showing someone you love a working draft of yourself.

Perhaps life just turned a person who tried harder into a person who felt they must write it on someone else's report.

How could he even attempt it, after eight days and nights of bombing? And yet this is when he must write: now, in the lull between attacks...War made one do everything when one wasn't at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living.

I'm under strict instructions to write a happy ending. Rule number ninety-seven: You're not allowed to make a dragon cry." "Right," Said Sophie, starting the engine. "Tears might quench their fire.

The earliest impressions are pictographic in form - little pictures that are the stylized versions of the things they represent. And most things they represent are plants and animals. The earliest writing deprived from vision rather than sound.

ChrisGrabenstein.com

CHRIS GRABENSTEIN is the coauthor (with James Patterson) of the number one New York Times bestseller I Funny.