Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.

~ Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Writing Writing Process

Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky...more will want to do the former than the latter.

~ Stephen King

Stephen King Criticism Writing Writing Process

Developing your voice takes... time and practice.

~ Darynda Jones

Darynda Jones Advice For Writers Craft Developing Your Voice Writing Process

In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.

~ C.g. Jung

C.g. Jung Dreams Jung Jungian Jungian Psychology Wisdom Writing Process

The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.

~ Claudia Bakker

Claudia Bakker Characters Characters In Books Characters In Novels Writing Writing Books Writing Process

Writing is easy. Writing a publishable book is hard.

~ Eliza Green

Eliza Green Writing Advice Writing Process

A simple word or phrase on a blank sheet of paper gathers momentum as I wonder at what it could mean, where it could take place, why, and what if? . . . And then, I write.

~ Tyrean Martinson

Tyrean Martinson Writing Writing Process

Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.

~ Gloria D. Gonsalves

Gloria D. Gonsalves Writing Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Tips

Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

~ Luke Taylor

Luke Taylor Fiction Writing Writers On Writing Writing Advice Writing Craft Writing Process

I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing. And it's really in the gap - it's in the erasures - that I think the novelist can best go to work because inevitably in history in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question, why did it happen the way it did? Where was the turning point?

~ Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel Historical Fiction History Turning Point Writing Process

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Gudjon Bergmann Writing Writing A Book Writing Advice Writing Process

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like -- what’s going on -- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness]

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Scifi Writing Writing Process

Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it . . . The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I wanted to flee from Thomas's house.

~ Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm Biography Literary Criticism Writing Process

I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then I rewrite.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Gudjon Bergmann Writing Process

It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every time you would hand in an assignment, a paper, or even a thesis. Your book needs time to mature, and you must allow yourself the luxury of rewriting and editing until you are satisfied.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Gudjon Bergmann Writing Writing Books Writing Process

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.

~ Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve Writing Writing Process

Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession

~ Alexandra Johnson

Alexandra Johnson Journaling Writing Writing Process

When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it.

~ Alvi Syahrin

Alvi Syahrin Manuscript Manuscript Quotes Motivation Writers Life Writers On Writing Writers Quotes Writing Writing Advice Process Writing Novels Writing Process

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture — still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë Estoicism Novelists Real Life Facts Writing Process

Writing to impress others is the surest path to pretentious mediocrity.

~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

Katerina Stoykova Klemer Creativity And Attitude Writing Writing Process

And now, I have another good reason to speed up my baby narratives to make my author's profile appear more respectable.

~ Armineonila M.

Armineonila M. Conceptualizing Stream Of Thought Writing Process

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea.

~ Amy Poehler

Amy Poehler Creative Process Writing Writing Process

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Writing Writing Process

Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.

~ Adam Langer

Adam Langer Writing Writing Process

...he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to story that he finally couldn't write it...When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another.

~ Pete Dexter

Pete Dexter Writing Process

Talk about something else. Tell me about this book you are writing. What book? I say. Then : Oh, I know what you mean. I am not doing that anymore. I couldn't finish._________I don't think he knows, not really. Not yet. In my haste to finish this story before death overtakes me, inevitably I have left out many things, and often I have expresses myself inelegantly, and no doubt here and there I have said more than I meant to. When you return, my dear type writer, we will review what we have done, and add this and subtract that. This work has become my hobby and my consolation, and I enjoy it.

~ Phillip Margulies

Phillip Margulies Writing Process

The movementOf the body isWhere poetryBegins

~ Clint Catalyst

Clint Catalyst Poetry Poetry Quote Poetry Quotes Life Writing Writing Process Writing Process Creative Process

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

~ John Irving

John Irving Writing Process

There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.

~ Darynda Jones

Darynda Jones Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

If you don’t make time for writing, writing won’t make time for you.

~ Sandra Elaine Scott

Sandra Elaine Scott Writing Writing Advice Writing Craft Writing Philosophy Writing Process

Writings are thoughts in a defined moment.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Lailah Gifty Akita Moments Quote Positive Thought Read And Write Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

Writing is easy. Saying something that would make a difference is the task.

~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

Aleksandra Ninkovic Hard Work Making A Difference Writing Writing Process

Humor is so subjective, not everyone is going to get what you are peddling. Others will be offended when what you meant no offense whatsoever. Those are the stakes. You have to be able to stand up for yourself and what you’ve written. Comedy pushes limits, makes people uncomfortable, and is a natural reaction to the environment. Otherwise, as I said, it is forced. Let it flow and give your characters permission to cross a line or two, but only if you can take the heat afterward.

~ Darynda Jones

Darynda Jones Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan.

~ Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust Writing Writing Process

I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to the words you choose and the order in which you arrange them.

~ Darynda Jones

Darynda Jones Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.

~ Darynda Jones

Darynda Jones Advice For Writers Writing Writing Craft Writing Process

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.

~ Jonathan Maas

Jonathan Maas Inspirational Parenthood Time Management Writers On Writing Writing Writing Process

Do what you love...

~ Lise Cartwright

Lise Cartwright Freelancing Outsourcing Writing Process

The challenge of the writer is to transform—artistically and imaginatively—a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.

~ Hillel F. Damron

Hillel F. Damron Writing Writing Process

Trawling through a dusty attic of my addled memory I found that I’d been rather in a lot of daft and amusing situations, so I set about writing them down. The only problem being that I was a lot better at telling stories than writing them, probably because telling them involves a lot less typing and a lot more shouting.

~ Guy Pratt

Guy Pratt Writing Inspiration Writing Process
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