Writing Craft Quotes

An author needs a lot more than one person to succumb to his literary seductive charms, but, like Saul, he must realize that he doesn't have to--and indeed cannot--capture the hearts of every possible reader out there. No matter who the writer, his ideal intended audience is only a small faction of all the living readers. Name the most widely read authors you can think of--from Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens to Robert Waller, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling--and the immense majority of book-buyers out there actively decline to read them.

~ Thomas Mccormack

But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

~ Elizabeth George

I tell everyone who asks me about writing...almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it's that 290 or so pages in between that are tough!

~ Brooklyn Hudson

You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.

~ Lisa Cron

A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.

~ James A. Owen

If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.

~ George Orwell

This is the secret to mastering any discipline: as you conquer one, you'll find it easier to tackle another.

~ Jeff Goins

You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.

~ Rick Aster

If there is method here, it is hard to discern it. Let it be repeated: the use of capitals is a matter not or rules but of taste; but consistency is at least not a mark of bad taste.

~ H. W. Fowler

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

~ John Edgar Wideman

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

~ André Gide

Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.

~ Naguib Mahfouz

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing. Voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style but a voice all their own.

~ Naveed Saleh

If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either

~ James M. Cain

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

~ Bernard Cornwell

The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.

~ Miranda July

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Don’t write what you know—what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you—and interests you deeply—and your readers will catch fire at your words.

~ Valerie Sherwood

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.

~ Anne Lamott

Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick—then it’s personal. The bad guy isn’t just the “bad guy” anymore, he’s the BAD GUY!

~ Michael J. Sullivan

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

~ Virginia Woolf

If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.

~ Lisa Cron

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

~ Stephen King

Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.

~ T.l. Crain

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

~ Jamaica Kincaid

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

~ Kim Edwards

I’ve come to the end of another book alive. At times like this I’m always at a loss for words.

~ Joe Coomer

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.

~ Horace Walpole

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.

~ Pat Conroy

To my mind, the most important thing in any form of fiction is the human element, but only if it takes us beyond the everyday, into situations that examine the complexities that may fascinate or puzzle us. To dwell on the mundane as some kind of a writing exeercise is useless.

~ Graham Worthington

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

~ William Hazlitt

You could say, in a way, that I'm not actually a writer, though perhaps I might be called a recorder? ... I just happen to be one of those holding the pen, that's all.

~ Etienne De L'amour

When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.

~ Edwidge Danticat

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

~ Linus Pauling

It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.

~ Betsy Lerner

I just write whenever I can.

~ Elmer Kelton

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

~ Thomas Harris

There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.

~ Aaron Allston

God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.

~ Gerard De Marigny

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable

~ Jacques Barzun