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This is important to writing. . . that is, it is important to my own writing. This. . . is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played in it, dug in it, planted in it, and walked over it. It is where I began. And all my writing begins with a landscape such as this. A place.

~ Patricia Maclachlan

Patricia Maclachlan Writing Craft

Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth.

~ Stella Atrium

Stella Atrium Criticism Of Substance Writing Craft

Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur...These factors--the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations--remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.Eric Leed

~ Robin Jarvis

Robin Jarvis 28 Pedestrian Walking Writing Craft

Bringing you closer to the fragile edge of living is the job of a writer.

~ Julie Rodelli

Julie Rodelli Writing Writing Craft Writing Philosophy

I have this idea that writing is all about divergent thinking colliding with a hurricane of emotions.

~ R. Y.s. Perez

R. Y.s. Perez Introduction Writing Writing Craft

Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match....One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.

~ Renni Browne

Renni Browne Writing Craft

At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her.Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse's power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.

~ Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Writing Craft

Rejection sucks. It sucks every time, whether it's a big suck or a little suck. But it's part of the process. It's part of being a writer. It's a badge that says 'I'm serious about this, and I'm sending out my work.

~ Allison K. Williams

Allison K. Williams Writing Writing Craft

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

~ Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Writing Writing Craft Writing Inspiration

The best lie is the one that has an element of truth, so it’s good to include something real in your fiction.

~ Renee Conoulty

Renee Conoulty Writing Writing Craft

Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.

~ Dan Alatorre

Dan Alatorre Writing Craft Writing Inspiration

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.

~ John Gardner

John Gardner Writing Writing Craft

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk.

~ Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish Writing Craft

The invisibility factor of women in this industry is not unlike the invisibility of girl geeks. We know we exist, but everyone else seems to think we’re an enigma every time they get the notion to write about us and what we apparently want. What we want isn’t any different than what anyone wants. Good stories. With characters we can relate to or identify with or that are interesting to read about. And we’d like to feel welcome, not the perpetual other. We don’t want to feel excluded or like props in every narrative. We don’t want or need every story to be about a girl character. But we’d like them to be treated with the same care and attention male characters are. And it is possible, even in male dominated narratives.

~ Mariah Huehner

Mariah Huehner Writing Craft

I'm my characters' galley slave.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Chloe Thurlow Writing Craft

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive

~ Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish Writing Craft

Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

~ Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead Writing Writing Craft

For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.

~ Brett Armstrong

Brett Armstrong Writing Craft Writing Philosophy

A good writer reveals beauty in the mundane and truth in tragedy. Words are a tool; a currency of the mind, and the best writers weave passages into our hearts that our bones remember.

~ Maria Reeves

Maria Reeves Writing Writing Craft Writing Inspiration

There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread.

~ Noah Lukeman

Noah Lukeman Punctuation Self Editing Writing Books Writing Craft

Voice is really about letting your characters loose.

~ C.s. Lakin

C.s. Lakin Writing Craft

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .

~ Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner Writing Craft

In the minds of some people, writing is one thing, but thinking is quite another. If they define writing as spelling, the production of sentences with random meanings, and punctuation, then they might have a case. But who would accept such a definition? Writing is the production of meaning. Writing is thinking.

~ George Hillocks Jr.

George Hillocks Jr. Writing Craft Writing Philosophy

Thousands of years ago, there were no writers; just storytellers. I would love to be a storyteller but I am just a writer. I don’t appeal to the ears; I appeal to the mind.

~ King Samuel Benson

King Samuel Benson Acceptance Of Oneself Writing Craft

One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Chloe Thurlow Characters Writing Craft

How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be 'and,' 'the,' and 'I,' and 'it,' and so on, and there's a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Humor Writing Writing Craft

Bye-bye. Nice knowing you. But if you are waiting for that perfect idea to strike like lightning during a dust storm (I live in New Mexico), you could be waiting a long time. Ideas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can’t walk to the bathroom without being hit with another idea. It’s what you DO with that idea that matters. Here is your mantra: BICHOK, BICHOK, BICHOKTranslation: Butt in chair, hands on keys. Just write. Every stinking day.

~ Darynda Jones

Darynda Jones Writing Writing Craft Writing Ideas

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

~ Constance Hale

Constance Hale Editing Writing Craft

The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.

~ William Zinsser

William Zinsser Writing Craft

No writing is effortless. I’m not saying you can’t have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I’m not saying a character hasn’t somehow gone in a different direction that I wanted her to go, but that was me, not her. I let her get away from me. I let her roam free and nine times out of ten, the result is not good. I have to go back and start over because she veered off the path of my book. She changed the vision. And I did that. Not her.

~ Darynda Jones

Darynda Jones Characters Writing Writing Craft

From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet... technology progression yes... style?

~ David H. Millar

David H. Millar Social Commentary Technology Change Writing Craft

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.

~ Christopher Morley

Christopher Morley Writing Craft Writing Philosophy

Any thing is interesting if you can communicate it. There are no unimportant subjects for the enlivened mind.

~ Kris Saknussemm

Kris Saknussemm Inspirational Writing Craft

The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow!

~ John Gaver

John Gaver Writing Craft Writing Inspiration

Sixteen unseeing stone of disheveled male slammed into her; Robin was knocked off her feet and catapulted backwards, handbag flying, arms windmilling, towards the void beyond the lethal staircase.

~ Robert Galbraith

Robert Galbraith Writing Craft

...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

~ Lisa Cron

Lisa Cron Memoirs Neuroscience Writing Craft

Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. The quality of writing—which is crucial in almost every other form of literature—is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn’t anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don’t want to begin with “Once upon a time,” because the audience gets antsy.

~ William Goldman

William Goldman Screenplays Structure Writing Craft

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.

~ John Irving

John Irving Fiction Writing Truth Writing Craft

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain Plot Writing Writing Craft

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain Characters Writing Writing Craft
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