Quotes About Writing

The danger with using too many words is that your statement may open up too many story loops.

All experienced writers know the key to great writing isn't in what they say; it's in what they don't say. The more we cut out, the better the screenplay or book.

Don't Get Cute or Clever Cute and clever language is almost always the enemy of clarity. Clarity sells, while cute and clever confuse.

But I didn't like thinking about myself anymore. You get tired of thinking about yourself all the time when you're a writer.

Everything's a mirror when you're a writer; the computer monitor is a mirror. Who thinks they are so important they need to write books about themselves? Who are these people who write about themselves, and how did I become one of them?

The thing about writing a story, in real life and on paper, is half the effort is just figuring out what the story is going to be.

Commas are not your friend.

The explanatory paragraph is a great way to accomplish both.

The reality is, what writers write and the way they live can be as different as a lump of coal and a diamond. The written life is shined to a deceptive gloss.

Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you are going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you're not going to want to do it. It's like that with writing books, and it's like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.

And there it was: setting, conflict, climax, and resolution. As silly as it seemed, it met the requirements of the heart and it matched the facts of reality

Es verdad lo que Steven Pressfield dice: hay una fuerza que se opone a lo bello que hay en el mundo y muchísimos nos estamos rindiendo. Robert McKee afirma al final de su libro que el mundo necesita que seamos valientes. El mundo requiere que escribamos algo mejor.

Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you are going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you're not going to want to do it. It's like that with writing books, and it's like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.

Henry James escribió Los papeles de Aspern

And that's why I've chosen to write these pages as I've written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.

Books are written by the alone for the alone.

author of more than

J.C. Greenburg

Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one's end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.

W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?

M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.

Do you know why God invented writers? Because He loves a good story. And He doesn't give a damn about words. Words are the curtain we've hung between Him and our true selves. Try not to think about the words. Don't strain for the perfect sentence. There's no such thing. Writing is guesswork. Every sentence is an educated guess, the reader's as much as yours. Think about that the next time you curl a piece of paper into your typewriter.

Do you know why God invented writers? Because he loves a good story. And he doesn't give a damn about the words. Words are the curain we've hung between him and our true selves. Try not to think about the words. Don't strin for the perfect sentence. There's no such thing. Writing si guesswork. Every sentence is an educated guess, the readers as much as yours.

Writers write. Everyone else makes excuses.