Quotes About Writing

I'm going to write about them as I took them -- with a smile.

For additional wisdom from this master of the craft, read The Successful Novelist and visit the writing section of his website at davidmorrell.net.

For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me.

I was a pretty good fighter. But it was the writers who made me great.

Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn't want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, "good book," as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.

As I sit with pen in hand, I am wondering, "Just what the hell do you think you are doing, Kelly?" I ask myself all the questions: how and why and will they be able to understand; can you spell good enough to get this message across? I keep coming up with the same answer: "Give it a try"- this as you see, is what I will do.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Oddly, the highly productive writer found writing wearing. "My botherations often won't let me work,"11 he complained. He

Please note that most such cause-effect story repairs can be handled in a few words. The key point here is not to exhaust the reader with great details, but simply to make sure that author-inserted causes are shown to have effects, and author-desired effects can be seen to have had causes.

Today's "fully developed scene," consequently, tends to run shorter than it once did. You may encounter scene situations where you simply can't develop all the complex immediate issues in fewer than a dozen pages. If so, that's fine. But I suspect that the average, "developed" print-fiction scene today runs between four and six pages, and some are shorter than that.

It's axiomatic among professional novelists that when things are going hideously for the lead character, the book is probably going along just wonderfully, thank you.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

that a principal "obstacle to writing improvement is our tendency to dwell on either the final results or the mental origins of writing to the exclusion of the activity of writing, as if an empty gap separated writing from thinking.

The pain of writing stems from comparing your blank screen with the finished pages you see all around you. But beautiful writing is built one step at a time, just like a house. Take the steps slowly, break them down into pieces small enough to handle easily, and the agony will disappear.

Even the little bit that must be known will block easy entry to the story if it delays the action line. The secret, Hunter Thompson said, is to "blend, blend, blend." You launch action immediately and then blend the exposition into it, submerging it in modifiers, subordinate clauses, appositives, and the like.

But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.

For my little dog, Pip, who joined our family during the writing of this story. Thanks for rescuing me.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

She was a contradiction like that, you know. The things she wrote down were warmer than her, in person. That sounds like she's dead, he thought. Well, in a way, she is, you know, in a way she is dead. — 'How To Get Away With Suicide

That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.

So what I do, more than play any instrument - I mean, I love to play - but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.

Mrs. Cheerson, our old teacher? She gave us an essay to write over the holiday. It was on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and it was good, and I think it's stupid to spoil a good book by writing an essay on it. So I didn't do it.

When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specifically: His rhinoceros smelled like a poppadom: sweaty, salty, strange and strong. Her editor would cut that line.