Quotes About Writing

But when you write something down, you have to think it all the way through. Sometimes, I'm not even sure how I feel about something until I write a story about it. I figure it out while I'm writing the story.

The loneliness of writing drives me nuts sometimes. Notice when it's going bad, it's loneliness and when it's going good it's solitude.

I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer.

Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.

Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.

If I am an artist, I have a vocation. As one drawn to a lover or called to a religious mission, I go to my work—my writing—because it is essential to my happiness.

Writing is an animal that lives in the soul. It must not be whipped into doing tricks. It is not a circus animal. It can be fierce, but it is not malevolent. It can be playful, but it is not without wisdom. Above all, it is wild. A wild animal has to sleep sometimes. This is a time of deep sleep for my writing.

It occurred to me that when I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait.

But if you worry about other people as you write a first draft, you will not be able to free your unconscious mind to give up its treasures. It will be bound by the great dogs of your fear,

In writing, we see, sometimes with fear and trembling, who we have been, who we really are, and we glimpse now and then who we might become.

Something in me that was broken, cracked—becomes whole. The cracks, if I write them with utter honesty, are where "the light gets in." The present meets the past, and healing begins.

I have come to understand, through my own writing and through working with other writers, that fear is a friend of the writer. Where there is fear, there is buried treasure. Something important lies hidden—something that matters—like the angel waiting in the stone that Michelangelo began to carve.

That first voice, the voice of home, is the one the writer must protect from the contempt or disdain or disregard of any critic, no matter how famous or capable that critic may be. It is not all that a mature writer needs; surely every writer needs the tools of literary criticism and as much knowledge of various traditions as possible—but a profound acceptance of and trust in one's own voice is the first and most important thing the writer needs.

Maybe she is right. Maybe the old self has to die for the new self to be born. Or maybe, for me, the old self doesn't have to die. Maybe who I have been is not erasable on the tablet of who I am, or in the book of who I will become. Maybe writing, like painting, can be pentimento—one layer over another, the early layers now and then showing through.

Writing is often a struggle between the personal and the universal, and the way writers deal with that struggle varies.

You cannot get emotionally involved in the writing, the object for the writer is to manipulate the reader so that the reader feels the emotion. Quote from a radio interview on the Reality Break show in 1997.

Pat's take on « Organic Writing » : « I don't make an outline before writing a book, the subconscious formulates the story. You can't stop it – it just happens. I never know what I'll end up with. I begin researching the subject and writing at the same time. My subconscious is telling me a story, so I'm being entertained. I don't know what's going to happen." Quote from 1997

What I like to do is write the story, see where it takes me -- and then check out the details I don't know. When I first started writing, there were a lot of things about the world that I understood but didn't have the vocabulary for -- and even more things that I just had no idea about. For instance, do you know all the parts of a door frame? Or what flowers bloom in the spring in alpine climates? There's a surprising amount of homework involved in writing a book.

If I've already figured out how the book ends, why bother to finish writing it? My writing isn't terribly efficient, because I often have to backtrack a bit when I change my mind, but I like the sense of discovery that comes from not knowing what happens next.

The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I'll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.

some of the original authors like Hartman von Aue or Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

So, in a fit of pique, I came up with the silliest thing I could think of, and handed the book in under the title "Bowling for Dragons

One of the things everybody seems to want to ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" When people ask me this, my usual response is, "Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is writing them down.