Quotes About Writing

Revising while you generate text is like drinking decaffeinated coffee in the early morning: noble idea, wrong time.

You don't need special traits, special genes, or special motivation to write a lot. You don't need to want to write--people rarely feel like doing unpleasant tasks that lack deadlines--so don't wait until you feel like it. Productive writing comes from harnessing the power of habit, and habits come from repetition p.129

Writing time is for writing, not for checking e-mail, reading the news, or browsing the latest issues of journals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to download articles while writing, but I can do that at the office. The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control.

Do you need to "find time to teach"? Of course not---you have a teaching schedule, and you never miss it. [...] Finding time is a destructive way of thinking about writing. Never say this again. Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write.

Academic writers are bad writers for three reasons. First, they want to sound smart. "If the water is dark," goes a German aphorism, "the lake must be deep." Instead of using good words like smart, they choose sophisticated or erudite.

Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.

Remember, you're allocating time to write, not finding time to write.

Equipment will never help you write a lot; only making a schedule and sticking to it will make you a productive writer.

Writing is more fun when you have a partner, so find friends who share your research interests. Two authors can write faster, can complement expertise, can help with hard decisions, and understand context of decisions made.

Binge writers spend more time feeling guilty and anxious about not writing than schedule followers spend writing.

Writing is more than typing words: Any action that is instrumental in completing a writing project counts as writing.

To write a lot, you should rethink your mental models of rejection and publication. Rejections are like a sales tax on publications: The more papers you publish, the more rejections you receive.

Put your "inner writer" back on its leash and give it a chew toy.

But binge writers are also binge readers and binge statisticians. The bad habits that keep them from getting down to writing also keep them from doing the prewriting (Kellogg, 1994)—the reading, outlining, organizing, brainstorming, planning, and number-crunching necessary for typing words.

When confronted with their fruitless ways, binge writers often proffer a self-defeating dispositional attribution: "I'm just not the kind of person who's good at making a schedule and sticking to it." This is nonsense, of course. People like dispositional explanations when they don't want to change [...]

Writing a journal article combines all the elements that deter motivation: The probability of success is low; the likelihood of criticism and rejection is high; and the outcome, even if successful, isn't always rewarding.

Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend to them than inspiration

Writing involves many [acts] tasks, not just generating text

Writing a book is like injecting anabolic steroids: it if doesn't kill you, it'll make you stronger and hairier.

Writing Well by William Zinsser

Binge writers are also binge readers and binge statisticians.

Collecting data is easy; writing about data is hard.

Even though I've written more than a hundred short stories I always think that I will never come up with another decent one. It's agony.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.