Quotes About Writing

I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.

Écrire, c'est fermer les yeux en les gardant ouverts.

The reason for writing it down on paper or on a computer where you can see it is because the brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin' match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can't do that while it's still in your head.

Spiritual Autolysis—trying to write something true and keeping at it until you do—is the best possible way of identifying and eradicating our falseness because the process of writing minimizes the weaknesses and maximizes the strengths of the intellect. Nothing false can survive illumination by a steady and focused mind.

I believe in writing somewhat quickly, getting the story down; it can be bad, it can be a mess, but the key thing is to get it down.

Read heavily in the area where you want to write. Be aware of what's selling and what's doing well but don't try to write to market trends; they are fleeting.

I want to be a writer you can always depend on for a good read during your vacation, during your flight, during a time in your life when you want to forget the world around you. The nicest notes I've received from readers are those that tell me I've gotten them back into reading for entertainment. For me, there is no greater compliment.

Keep your head down, avoid all the distractions of being a writer today--all the shifts in the business, all the drama, all the debating about where publishing is going--and write the best story that you can. It sounds a bit glib, but I think this is advice a lot of people are having trouble following right now. It is so hard to focus. But that is the single key to success.

I tend to be a plotter, just because I do have to write an outline of the book for my publisher, and I like to have an idea of where I'm headed. That said, I don't treat the outline as cast in stone, and I often get better ideas as I write, so the outline is a living thing. What often drives change is when I start writing a particular character and she or he asserts themselves more strongly than I thought they would.

Diction is not memorizing vocabulary, not memorizing word lists, not overusing the thesaurus, not replacing all the short words with long ones.

Writing should be a joyous act, not drudgery, and frankly so should the teaching of it.

students suffer from page fright.

You are learning what you aren't writing, and this is helping you find out what you are writing. —Anne Lamott

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

Yeah, I've been interested in music since I was a teenager, always writing songs.

I think my love of journalizing my life comes from my mom.

I used to think of them as prolegomena for a book; now I would see a book as prolegomena for the notes.

The goal of using stories isn't to write better stories. The goal of product development isn't to make products.

If your goal in reading this book is to learn to write better stories, you've got the wrong goal.

I apologize from distracting you from reading my books.

Stockpiling Words, Language, and Lyrics—doing exercises like freewriting, writing poems, refining, and revising, all of which I'll talk about in the next section Stockpiling Music, Songs, and Parts of Songs—making demo recordings, practicing, learning other people's songs, and writing parts for songs in progress Pairing Words and Music—writing lyrics to a melody and searching for matches between stockpiled demos and lyric sets, poems, and freewriting

because I was a lazy idiot and didn't bother to write down the crazy cool tuning I invented. Lesson learned.

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.