Quotes About Writing

When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.

A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.

When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.

The primary goal of the so-called nonfiction text is to relay the facts of an event - the facts about a person, the facts of history - which is not why I turned to this genre.

Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.

My first book deal was actually for a textbook - 'Judo and You' - that I wrote while teaching at Temple University. A scout for Kendall-Hunt came looking for someone to write the book, and even though it wasn't a course I was teaching there, I agreed to write it.

When I was young, I would just write poems into textbooks in class. Everybody needs that outlet. For me, I think it's less about learning about myself and more about just needing to get things out sometimes.

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

If you are making money writing, you are doing great. If you can support yourself writing, you are a success. I don't care if you're writing textbooks or Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for weighty publications of world renown: If you're writing and it's paying the bills, consider yourself a successful writer.

I just started to put texting and phones in my books. I want my books to be read 20 years from now; I don't want them to be dated.

Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.

I don't take part in texting and those other things myself, so I don't really know if people put as much thought into messaging as they used to into writing letters.

Clearly texting, SMS and chat are very different than writing a letter or email.

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing.

I still put punctuation in my texts. If it's an 'I', I make sure it's a capital.

I began to see that the short texts I was writing were poster material.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.

You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.

The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader.

I just love details; I love trying to make the reader smell what I was smelling at the time and see what I was seeing. Textures, too - all that kind of stuff is probably my strong suit as far as my writing goes, I would say.

Basically, I always wanted to be an author but went through all these other jobs while getting up the nerve to finally go for it with my writing! Thank goodness it worked; who knows what I might have done next?

I had spent five years not earning a penny, getting rejected. Thank God I had a husband who was supportive and encouraging. But I still said to myself, 'If the Everleighs doesn't sell, I'm finished with writing forever.' I was going to get an office job.