Quotes About Craft

Every time I hear writers talk about 'the muse,' I just want to bitch-slap them. It's a job. Do your job.

She sighed once, wishing she had a talent for the details of telling stories. She wasn't bad at themes, she mused, but she could never figure out how to turn a theme into an engaging tale.

Health and beauty. What next? Look, kid, I make wine, not skin cream.

profession." "Art

If you were my student, I'd tell you to shift as needed between the three POVs. Not constantly, but as appropriate to control authority, intimacy, and pace.

By writing , people present their lives as fiction and tackle their issues as a craft exercise . By redeeming their protagonist , they find their own redemption .

A storyteller makes us feel something. Makes us give a shit when we have no good reason to do so. Fun is not the last stop on the story train. The storyteller is master manipulator. The storyteller is cackling puppetmaster.

Writing is the act of creation. Put words on a page, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to seven-book epic fantasy cycles with books so heavy you could choke a hippo. But don't give writing too much power, either. A wizard controls his magic; it doesn't control him.

brother, a swarthy barrel-maker whose Breton

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

They looked, to all intents and purposes, like living men and women. But then wasn't that the trick of their craft? To imitate life so well the illusion was indistinguishable from the real thing?

The idea was like a hunk of wood, Caesar thought, requiring human craft and ingenuity to reveal the new shape within.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

I ask now, standing with my scissors among my flowers, Where can the shadow enter? [. . .] I am sick of the body, I am sick of my own craft, industry and cunning, of the unscrupulous ways of the mother who protects, who collects under her jealous eyes at one long table her own children, always her own.

Knitting is the saving of life.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.

To undertake executions for the master executioner [Heaven] is like hewing wood for the master carpenter.Whoever undertakes to hew wood for the master carpenter rarely escapes injuring his own hands.

Instinct is the elusive magic that happens when art collides with hard-won craft.

As a writer, you are that architect.

Doing a lot of reading is not the prerequisite to writing.

Comedy is not funny. Comedy is hard work and timing and lots and lots of rehearsals.

All My Children taught me a great work ethic; you work so hard on a soap opera! It is a good way to start in the business, get success without getting a big head and learn your craft.

I loved my time on All My Children. That show was a family to me. I am so sad that daytime is slowly fading away. I owe so much to daytime. I learned so much about my craft and I made so many wonderful friends there and I am so sad that it is all going away.

I am a trained professional liar. Do not read me as a textbook.