Quotes About Craft

friends who could write novel after novel as effortlessly as a politician could lie,

Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.

One of the elements of writing that is most delightful to the engaged reader is the element of surprise. And one of the ways to surprise the reader is to set up an expectation that you then veer away from it at the last moment. A stitch in time saves the penny earned. Or something like that.

A knitter only appears to be knitting yarn. Also being knitted are winks, mischief, sighs, fragrant possibilities, wild dreams.

In general, the trick is to bring the past forward into the present, so that you describe what happens in past tense instead of past perfect.

And so it goes with words and language. They're tools. All your writing life, you work with them . . . using them to tie your reader to your story.

Make no mistake about it, magick is an art form, and every true magician is an artist.

The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life.

Some of us might not understand why LeBron James is the way he is, but fortunately he found his great craft in life.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

You spend your life training to be an actor, observing people's characteristics so that you can design characters around what you've seen.

In normal life, 'simplicity' is synonymous with 'easy to do,' but when a chef uses the word, it means 'takes a lifetime to learn.'

A spinning stash is much more complex than a knitting stash. It is like the first mother goddess. Everything comes from it, and nothing happens without it. You can't have yarn without the fiber. (From the essay 'Spinning Stash')

She was a good if sloppy writer.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

Technique is the basis of every pursuit. If youre a sportsman or youre a singer or a swimmer, well that comes under sport but you have to develop a basic technique to know what youre doing at any given time.

Because you're going to help me train a seven-year-old Witch who's got the raw power right now to turn us both into dust and yet"—he dropped the shoe onto the chair—"is abysmal at basic Craft.

I am Tersa the Weaver, Tersa the Liar, Tersa the Fool.

My nightly craft is winged in white, a dragon of night dark sea. Swift born, dream bound and rudderless, her captain and crew are me. We've sailed a hundred sleeping tides where no seaman's ever been And only my white-winged craft and I know the wonders we have seen.

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

Your hands found me like an architect.

I just want to be a professional. I couldn't live without acting.

For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.