Quotes About Craft

Stein, Sol, Stein on Writing. Perhaps the best book ever written on the overall craft of fiction. Straightforward, practical, easily absorbed.

Actors and directors have written about it, psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, and even biologists have pondered it. What is acting, and how is it done? How does someone become someone else? Can someone become someone else? How much of what an actor does is due to that mysterious quality we call talent?

Sounds like a plan worthy of Athena.

I made you something

knit and purl These stitches are the fundamentals of knitting and are the basis of every garment. The knit stitch is a series of flat, vertical loops that produces a knitted fabric face and the purl stitch is its reverse. One side is smooth, the other bumpy. Knit is what you show the world; purl is the soft, nubbly underside you keep close to the skin.

Watch a French housewife as she makes her way slowly along the loaded stalls… searching for the peak of ripeness and flavor… What you are seeing is a true artist at work, patiently assembling all the materials of her craft, just as the painter squeezes oil colors onto his palette ready to create a masterpiece.

Singling out "women's fiction" for genre derision never fails to piss me off. Somehow worse when women do it. Case in pt: Editor says crowd-sourcing editorial for romance & erotica not bad idea b/c "no great artistry at stake" Yes, genre fiction not high art. But it's a craft we take seriously, writing for love of storytelling, not writing whatever sells.

A man should have a hobby. It keeps him out of trouble. -Madeleine Pilaster

In order to obtain and hold power a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, craft and cruelty.

As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a lesser number of words.

Novel writing is World Building & Word Weaving (Neil Postman's terms).

You can set up an altar to God in your minds by means of prayer. And so it is fitting to pray at your trade, on a journey, standing at a counter or sitting at your handicraft.

Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to write.

Good writing is rhythm.

I'm a journeyman actor, and I don't ever want to forget that. With romantic-lead dreams.

My nature is subdu'dTo what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

There's an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer's mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over again until it is right--all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.

And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.

I'm still learning my craft.

There were larger reasons for Walter Whitman's travails. He was a blunt-spoken worker accustomed to honest self-sufficiency in a time when the market was calling for new traits: slickness and self-promotion, with more than a dash of craft. He might love cattle, children, and living under his own roof, but what he needed in the new environment was an eye for the deal.

Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.

What tame, memory-dependent work I was doing. How polite my poems were, how still they sat, how representational. We poets talked about craft, but what we meant were tricks and illusions.