Quotes About Craft

You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.

Poetry reading is the chamber music of the actor's craft.

I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn't really tell a story. To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it's got to be a craft.. You've got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I have sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what's going to happen.

The first draft of anything is shit. — ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Only by using everything and anything you know about the craft of storytelling can you make your talent forge story. For talent without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

Aristotle wrote The Poetics, the "secrets" of story have been as public as the library down the street. Nothing in the craft of storytelling is abstruse. In fact, at first glance telling story for the screen looks deceptively easy. But moving closer and closer to the center, trying scene by scene to make the story work, the task becomes increasingly difficult, as we realize that on the screen there's no place to hide.

The writer works at his skills until knowledge shifts from the left side of the brain to the right

Mastery of craft frees the subconscious.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

The weak grey light that serves as harbinger of red and golden dawn faintly lit my window. I fumbled for a candle, found and lit it, and by its little light saw that the rose floating in the bowl was dying. It had already lost most of its petals, which floated on the water like tiny, un-seaworthy boats, deserted for safer craft. Dear God, I said. I must go back at once.

You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle and show up as a leader. Life is all about how you exercise the choices available to you. And your daily choices stack up to craft your destiny.

thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing

Writing is show business for shy people.

A painter without a brush is like a weasel without a tongue

Let craft, ambition, spite, Be quenched in Reason's night, Till weakness turn to might, Till what is dark be light, Till what is wrong be right!

A bodybuilder is a sculptor who carries with him his own material.

Writing headlines is a specialty - there are outstanding writers who will tell you they couldn't write a headline to save their lives.

All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.

As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.

The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Our research into human strengths does not support the extreme, and extremely misleading, assertion that 'you can play any role you set your mind to,' but it does lead us to this truth: Whatever you set your mind to, you will be most successful when you craft your role to play to your signature talents most of the time.

As it turns out, craft is to poetry what invention is to imagination--not antithetical, but needless. The eye does not invent the light; there's no need. The mind makes no materials; it doesn't have to. Imagination is the present state of things, and poems rejoice--in particular, in detail--that this is so. Again, the only work is trust, a trust rewarded by ease and by betterment.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.