Quotes About Authorship

You see, more than a simple matter of putting down words, writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write.

All I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.

For me, everyone I write of is real. I have little true say in what they want, what they do or end up as (or in). Their acts appall, enchant, disgust or astound me. Their ends fill me with retributive glee, or break my heart. I can only take credit (if I can even take credit for that) in reporting the scenario. This is not a disclaimer. Just a fact.

I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.

Sometimes, when you are reading a book you are enjoying very much, you begin thinking so hard about the characters and the story that you might forget all about the author, even if he is in grave danger and would very much appreciate your help. The same thing can happen if you are looking at a photograph. You might think so hard about whatever is in the photograph that you forget all about the person behind the camera.

It is why a favorite book feels like an old friend and a new acquittance at the same time, and the reason a favorite author can be familiar figure and a mysterious stranger all at once.

Anyone can write one book; for instance even politicians do it! Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer

Because assigning blame assigns responsibility. So I blame myself and give myself the responsibility to make it right.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

James Patterson

Nobody wrote The End in Story Thieves: The Stolen Chapters, and placed it on his shelf.

One thing about Faulkner I like, apart from the simplicity, on the whole, of his life, was that he wrote on the bedroom walls. That seems to me the true mark of a writer.

Pay for a cover. There are abundant sources out there now for getting a good cover design. Do a little Google searching. Check out a website called 99Designs.com. The basic range for a pro cover is around $ 200-$ 500. If you want something more complex and specific, you might pay an artist a bit more.

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Write down the POV character in the scene, the objective, and a list of possible obstacles. Write a tentative outcome. Spend a couple of minutes making a list of unexpected things. Go wild. One of them will please you. Then you're ready to write.

It takes about eighteen months, on average, for a book you contract with a publisher to make it to the bookstore shelves.

Paragraph 2 is the who you are paragraph. Don't gild the lily. Just put down your basic background and any literary awards or training you've received. If you are writing about your specialty (say, a lawyer writing a legal thriller), of course mention that, too.

Malone helped institutionalise a methodology that would prove crucial to those who would subsequently deny Shakespeare's authorship of the plays

Schmucker draws a sharp distinction between Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the poet, in what would soon be a favourite gambit of those who doubted his authorship:

By assuming that Shakespeare had to have experienced something to write about it with such accuracy and force, Malone also, unwittingly, allowed for the opposite to be true: expertise in the self-revealing works that the scant biographical record couldn't support–his knowledge of falconry for example, or of seamanship, foreign lands or the ways that the ruling class behaved–should disqualify Shakespeare as the author of the plays.

Until Malone had established a working chronology of Shakespeare's plays, no critic or biographer had ever thought to interpret Shakespeare's works through events in his life.

What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

the opening lines of 'Sonnet 93' in 1780, which set the direction of Shakespeare biography–and debates over authorship–on a new and irreversible course.