Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that’s one-third of a triathlon (authoring, publishing, and entrepreneuring).

~ Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki Self Publishing Writing Writing Process

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Writing Writing Process

For me, not knowing your theme until your finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe – there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there’s a high chance it won’t work.

~ David G. Allen

David G. Allen Theme Writing Craft Writing Process

I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

~ E.w. Hornung

E.w. Hornung Success Writing Writing Process

I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will probably be nonexistant a 100 years later, but - you know - i have no idea what else to do. I like creating. What else can i do?

~ Martijn Benders

Martijn Benders Creating Writing Process

He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he'd written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.

~ Laura Z. Hobson

Laura Z. Hobson Writing Process

Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.

~ Andromeda Edison

Andromeda Edison Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

...the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...

~ John Geddes

John Geddes Emotional Pain Weeping Writing From The Heart Writing Process Writing Secrets

Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear.

~ Russell T. Davies

Russell T. Davies Writing Process

Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.

~ Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki Writing Writing Process

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written

~ Julia Cameron

Julia Cameron Inspiration Writing Process

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

~ Jonathan Carroll

Jonathan Carroll Novelist Quotes Novels Short Fiction Short Stories Writing Writing Process

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.

~ Paul Auster

Paul Auster Escape From Reality Writing Process

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Writing Writing Process

...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...

~ John Geddes

John Geddes A Gift Devotion Ferocity Monomaniacal The Truth Writing Writing Process

... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...

~ John Geddes

John Geddes Early Writing Writing Process

...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...

~ John Geddes

John Geddes Stirring The Depths Under Water Writing Process

I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex. - 1946

~ Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse Paintings Writing Process

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers Creative Writing Gaudy Night Writing Writing Process

I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.

~ Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki Self Publishing Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

...there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...

~ John Geddes

John Geddes Impersonal World Myth Objective Reality Wisdom Writing Process

...I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...

~ John Geddes

John Geddes Art Interior Dialogue Mirror To Nature Refracting Shakespeare Writing Process

I’m feeling a low regarding writing. I sometimes think I should finish working on my book of stripper poetry that I started, but other times I feel like it’s not worth it. Sometimes I think I should work on my comic book idea, and then other times I want to work on a website, and still other times I think I should be working on this memoir. That’s a lot of thinking about writing without a whole lot of writing going on.

~ Sheila Hageman

Sheila Hageman Writing Writing Process

Most—but not all—of the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn’t want to be anyone’s employee if it interfered with their writing. They were halfway or all the way outside the mainstream and were often not interested in becoming part of the burgeoning corporate society. They had more freedom than your average American.

~ Sterling Lord

Sterling Lord Writing Craft Writing Process

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

~ C. Kennedy

C. Kennedy Writing Writing Advice Writing Craft Writing Humor Writing Philosophy Writing Process

A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

~ Wally Lamb

Wally Lamb Fiction Writing Writing Process

For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.

~ Shandy L. Kurth

Shandy L. Kurth Authors Books Fear Writing Writing Process

I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision, a complex of emotions, raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Writing Writing Philosophy Writing Process

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Writing Writing Philosophy Writing Process