Quotes About Craft

publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.

We're mimics, we're parrots - we're writers.

So, writing. What a bitch.

she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.

Writing Down the Bones

There's no way to tell until you've got it all down, and then there might just be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using. But you get it all down. You just write. I heard Natalie Goldberg, the author of Writing Down the Bones, speak on writing once. Someone asked her for the best possible writing advice she had to offer, and she held up a yellow legal pad, pretended her fingers held a pen, and scribbled away.

Oh, my darling, wish you were here! And my dark soul is happy again, because it does not know how to be anything else for very long, and because the pain is a deep dark sea in which I would drown if I did not sail my little craft steadily over the surface, steadily towards a sun which will never rise.

It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick.

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, It is the trade entering his body. The art must enter the body, too.

The entrepreneur is comfortable raising money, hiring and firing, renting more office space than she needs right now. The entrepreneur must dream big and persuade others to share her dream. The freelancer, on the other hand, can focus on craft. She can most easily build her business by doing great work, consistently.

That's the thing that most people don't realize. In real life, comedians aren't funny. They save it. They save it up.

Knowing the steps to create living growth: that is art.

Wickedness frames the engines of her own torment. She is a wonderful artisan of a miserable life.

Writing is the only thing in my life that doesn't get easier. It just doesn't.

And when I go to see plays, I marvel at how people can do that. I've done it all my life, but I still find it mystical.

to live life as a writer is a very lucky thing.

Language to me is a tool a very clumsy tool. And words are garden tools with which to till the soil of one's life.

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

As an actor, you want to do the best job possible, and you want the best scripts possible because it makes life more interesting.

That's when the ship came down. It came right down. Bam! There it was. Small." The ship, he said, was "kind of round, but oblong. It's kind of like an egg," a "standing-up egg." The craft was "real symmetrical . . . more oblong on the top half" and "about four feet off the ground," with some sort of "feet" holding it up.

There are, for example, consistent details of passage to and from the craft, the rich descriptions of the alien beings and the intricate relationships to them, the many non-traumatic activities and observations that occur within the craft, and the elaborate communications concerning the earth's ecology and other psychospiritual matters which are, in my experience, a frequent, if not regular, dimension of the abduction phenomenon.