Writing involves many [acts] tasks, not just generating text

~ Paul J. Silvia

Paul J. Silvia Writing Process

I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative.

~ Peter Straub

Peter Straub Peter Straub Villains Writing Process

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

~ Flannery O'connor

Flannery O'connor Writing Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Quotes

But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

~ Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro How To Write Writers Quotes Writing Writing Process

If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

~ Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett Writing Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Quotes

think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

~ Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh Writing Writing Advice Writing Craft Writing Process Writing Quotes

I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.

~ Chigozie Obioma

Chigozie Obioma Writing Craft Writing Philosophy Writing Process Writing Quotes

It is the trivial little facts about anything that describe it the most effectively.

~ Mary Maclane

Mary Maclane Female Adolescent Angst Genius Writing Process

Being a writer, I think, is much like being a parent or a pet parent in my case. I love all of my characters equally, even if I want you to hate them, I love them. If you don't love all your characters you're not doing it right.

~ Ellie Elisabeth

Ellie Elisabeth Author Advice Writing Writing Process

Writers don't kill characters. Characters kill characters.

~ Marialisa Demora

Marialisa Demora Humor Writing Process

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

~ William Inge

William Inge Writing Writing Process Writing Quotes

The last chapter in 'Alice in Worcestershire' is called 'Writing the book'.I started to write that 'Diary' chapter at the very beginning of the process and followed it through to the end... speaking to the reader.My decision to do this was because I've often read autobiographies and wondered how the author felt and how it impacted them writing about painful memories that had been locked away in a deep forgotten place.I wanted to know what was going in their 'present' life while they were writing; about the struggle with sharing their inner secrets and... I'm... inquisitive. (nosy)!It took me over five years to finish 'Alice in Worcestershire' because sometimes, I was simply too drained to continue. Periodically, I updated the 'Diary' chapter and, thankfully, it's enthusiastically appreciated by readers.

~ Eskay Teel

Eskay Teel Biography Reader Readers And Writers Readers Favorite Writers Life Writing From The Heart Writing Process

Writing a novel is a bit like being Daniel Boone. An author stands atop a ridge in a mountain range and can generally see a number of peaks in the distance. What lies between those peaks—the dales and glens, rivers, forests, and other features that distinguish one mountain landscape from another... is where the artistry and intrigue of the writing process lives. As the writer sets out into the story, leaving behind those high points—the beginning, a twist here and there, the climax, and, if perhaps a bit indistinct for the distance to cover, the end—entering the vale below, all manner of things can happen the writer never intended or expected at the onset.

~ Brett Armstrong

Brett Armstrong Writing Philosophy Writing Process

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

~ Caitlín R. Kiernan

Caitlín R. Kiernan Writing Writing Process

Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer’s is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Book Reading Readers Readers And Writers Reading For Life Writers On Writing Writing Process

I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one these particles, these molecules of texts, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own? I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again. [p.268]

~ Amos Oz

Amos Oz Writing Process

Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description.

~ C.s. Lewis

C.s. Lewis Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Quotes

When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.

~ Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed Nonfiction Writiing Quotes Writing Advice Writing Process

No writer ever puts into words which he or she thinks is unnecessary, learning how to discover that some are is one of the chief challenges in learning to write.

~ Anne E. Berthoff

Anne E. Berthoff Writing Advice Writing Process

When in doubt, go the scandalous route.

~ Kilian Grey

Kilian Grey Humor Writing Inspiration Writing Process

Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity thatconstantly threatens to overload short-term memory.

~ Linda Flower

Linda Flower Cognition Cognitive Functioning Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

~ Joshua Wolf Shenk

Joshua Wolf Shenk Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Quotes Writing Life

We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing is trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.

~ Duncan B. Barlow

Duncan B. Barlow Inspirational Writers On Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.

~ Samuel S. Vaughan

Samuel S. Vaughan 1969 Editing Iao Formula Writing Writing Process

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice.

~ Cheryl L. Ilov

Cheryl L. Ilov Inspirational Quotes Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Quotes

Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person’s own precursors: it revises a person’s conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the “now,” and alters the course and outcome person’s future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person’s thoughts, debunk a person’s delusion, and analyze a person’s values.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Self Development Self Examination Self Exploration Self Growth Writing Writing Process

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

~ James Baldwin

James Baldwin James Baldwin Writing Writing Process Writing Quotes

There's no rule for better writing. Make your own rules, and see what works best for you.

~ Tarang Sinha

Tarang Sinha Writing Writing Process

Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

~ William Goldman

William Goldman Inspirational Writers On Writing Writing Craft Writing Process

Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.

~ Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Writing Process

Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.

~ Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes Creative Writing Poetry Writing Writing Process Young Writers

I suppose I had some meaning when I wrote it, I believe I understood it then.

~ George Gordon Byron

George Gordon Byron Writing Writing Process Writing Quotes

Writing a novel is like taking a long cross-country journey. The hardest part is getting going, making sure you have all the items you need to take with you, double- and triple-checking that the route you’re taking is the best way. So often you leave your driveway and start north when you realize you actually needed to head southwest. I’ve never written a novel without a certain number of false starts. And it never seems to get easier. Part of me thinks it only gets harder.

~ Travis Thrasher

Travis Thrasher Writing Process

When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross over an intricate boarder where the conscious and unconscious minds meet, traversing the aperture where the real and the imaginary intermingle. I aspire to establish a detached vantage point where I can survey the entire human condition.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Writing Writing Philosophy Writing Process Writing Quotes

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.

~ Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante Writing Writing Process

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Writers On Writing Writers Quotes Writing Writing Process

Even at the moment when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left of it?

~ Percy Lubbock

Percy Lubbock Literary Criticism Writing Process

Develop the skill of writing to avoid errors but if you do make them, don’t be demotivated

~ Bernard Kelvin Clive

Bernard Kelvin Clive Writing Advice Writing Process

Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Memoir Writing Writers On Writing Writing Writing Philosophy Writing Process Writing Quotes

It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.

~ Stewart Stafford

Stewart Stafford Clichés First Drafts Originality Rewrites Rewriting Writing Writing Advice Writing Advice Process Writing Process
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