As you may know, my eBook 111 Quotes for Writers caused a bit of controversy among a few
writers who objected to having brief quotes from their self-published ebooks
(that I bought) included. Yeah, I know: who DOESN’T want exposure these days,
right? Well, apparently, there’s some paranoid, scarcity-minded individuals out
there that don’t yet get the concept of “free publicity”, never mind “context”
and “intention”.
So, anyway, while I’m still waiting to hear back from my
lawyer, I’ve decided to just take my eBook off of Amazon on my own accord. Instead
of selling it for $1.99, I’ll just post all the quotes here for you to enjoy,
along with the introduction to my eBook.
If you’d like to leave me a tip in my Tip Jar (upper right)
that works via PayPal to show your support for my many hours of effort,
professional cover design cost and hassle from jerks, that would be super.
I hope you find encouragement and insight among these quotes
as you navigate the writing life. (Note:
I’ve removed quotes from the main complainer, as well as two other cowards
writers that I suspect of going to Smashwords to complain instead of coming to
me directly.)
Hello Dear Reader!
A few months ago, I envisioned an eBook series that would
feature quotes or facts about a particular topic.
I got the idea as I was looking through my 100+ writing
craft books, noting the many highlighted passages.
Then, I began considering how I love coming across great
quotes—often sharing them with thousands of my Twitter followers and Facebook
fans. I remembered that, with Kindle, you can easily highlight quotes from
eBooks and share them with your friends or followers, posting a passage right
to Twitter or Facebook.
It was then that I got the big “aha!” moment.
In 111 Quotes for Writers, I’ve culled
encouraging, motivating, inspiring and instructional passages from over 100
authors, all from source material; that is, print books, magazines and eBooks
(not copy and pasted from online). While there are a dozen or two pithy quotes
in this eBook, most passages are around 60-100 words…meaty chunks for you to
contemplate and apply to your writing life.
Almost all of the quotes in 111 Quotes for Writers address
the nuts-and-bolts of writing life, both non-fiction and fiction: how we write,
why we write, where we get ideas, what we read and what it takes to make it as
a working writer, as well as how we deal with anxiety, fear, guilt, envy,
shame, perfectionism and other gremlins that accompany the creative
temperament. Some quotes capture the emotional urgency and authenticity that
needs to be present to elevate our fiction from “Who gives a damn?” to “I
can’t stop reading this book!”, as well as the need for discipline,
perseverance and courage. After all, writing isn’t for sissies!
So dive in at any point when you need inspired, encouraged
or motivated in your writing life.
And remember: When you need inspiration or want information…Call 111!
– Author Janet Boyer http://JanetBoyer.com
111 Quotes for Writers
1. Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it
unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship,
relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work.
God knows why, but they do. – Stephen King (On
Writing)
2. Read those authors who write the way you hope to write,
those who think he way you would like to think. But also read those who do not
think as you think or write as you want to write, and so be stimulated in
directions you might not take for many years. – Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)
3. Overwriting is irritating to read because oftentimes it’s
a way a writer has of showing off, and of making herself too much present in
her own material. Most readers want a kind of intimacy only between themselves
and what’s being written about, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. –
Elizabeth Berg (Escaping into the Open:
The Art of Writing True)
4. The well-made sentence transcends time and genre. A
beautiful sentence is a beautiful sentence, regardless of when it was written,
or whether it appears in a play or a magazine article. Which is just one of the
many reasons why it’s pleasurable and useful to read outside of one’s own
genre. – Francine Prose (Reading
Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to
Write Them)
5. A pro views her work as craft, not art. Not because she
believes art is devoid of a mystical dimension. On the contrary. She
understands that all creative endeavor is holy, but she doesn’t dwell on it.
She knows if she thinks about that too much, it will paralyze her. So she
concentrates on technique. The professional masters how, and leaves what and
why to the gods. – Steven Pressfield (The
War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles)
6. In writing, or any creative endeavor, removing yourself
from the process for a while can have great benefits. Your brain literally gets
an opportunity to make new neurological connections, which are going to take
the form of new, inventive ideas, and writing that is very inspired. – Joseph
Sestito (Write for Your Lives: Inspire
Your Creative Writing with Buddhist Wisdom)
7. Your life will teach you which stories to tell and which
details to notice. If you are faithful to the story, if you develop your
intuition, prick up your ears, look for the telling details, the detail worth
telling, you will be able to condense it all down into wabi sabi words filled
with beauty. Then your reader will love you for telling what is real and
authentic and moving. – Richard R. Powell (Wabi
Sabi for Writers)
8. Too many writers avoid their own strongest feelings
because they are afraid of them, or because they are afraid of being
sentimental. Yet these are the very things that will make beginning work ring
true and affect us. Your stories have to matter to you the writer before they
matter to the reader; your story has to affect you, before it can affect us. –
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter (What If?
Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers)
9. Good criticism is necessary to any art form, but the
unsolicited, negative variety is poison. If comments are unhelpful, ignore them
and boldly warp into the next galaxy. – Anne R. Allen (How to Be a Writer in the E-Age…and Keep Your E-Sanity!)
10. In fiction and memoir, the writer’s main
responsibilities are to write a thick, juicy steak of a story, and make the
readers care, bring us to tears or outrage or heart-thumping worry. Stories
with emotional power engage the reader’s intellect, senses, and emotions as he
sees and hears the unfolding action. – Jessica Page Morrell (Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us)
11. Writers—all writers, at all ages and all stages—must
realize all they have is the now.
Just this moment. There’s not another “time” that’s better for you to write. A
certain age when it’s all going to click. You haven’t missed anything, and you
haven’t started too early or too late. – Heather Sellers (Chapter after Chapter: Discover the Dedication and Focus You Need to
Write the Book of Your Dreams)
12. Quoting Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Allen
Ginsberg reminded us, “first thought, best thought”. This first thought comes
from your intuitive mind, where the creative process finds its foothold and the
ego holds no sway. This is the place of rich images and deep thoughts. Grasp
your pen lightly and let come what wants to come. – Judy Reeves (A Writer’s Book of Days)
13. The metaphor is the strongest imagistic intimate in the
writer’s bag of tricks. – Walter Mosley (This
Year You Write Your Novel)
14. Like fiction, nonfiction accomplishes its purpose better
when it evokes emotion in the reader. We might prefer everyone on earth to be
rational, but the fact is that people are moved more by what they feel than by
what they understand. – Sol Stein (Stein
on Writing)
15. Don’t wait for anything to guide your work. Dig deep
inside of yourself. You are the collective memory of your culture. – N.M. Kelby
(The Constant Art of Being a Writer)
16. On the surface, it appears that as the author you are
the dominant person in your relationship with your reader, for, after all, the
book would not exist without you. But rest assured that readers are quite
capable of chucking your book in the trash if they don’t feel you are speaking
to them—that somehow you have listened to them, have heard their wants and
needs. – Hal Zina Bennett (Write Starts:
Prompts, Quotes, and Exercises to Jumpstart Your Creativity)
17. While the blank page and the lack of time are both
obstacles to writing, there’s another, more insidious, threat to the beginning
writer: perfectionism. – Barbara DeMarco-Barrett (Pen on Fire)
18. We must become writers who accept things as they are,
come to love details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be
no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details
from continuing. – Natalie Goldberg (Writing
Down the Bones)
19. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but impatience is
definitely the most lethal attitude for a writer. – Sage Cohen (The Productive Writer)
20. Above all else, believe in your abilities to become
successful as a writer. Let your love of writing and the joy you find in it
carry you toward your dreams. If you keep at it, you will get there. – Kelly L.
Stone (Time to Write)
21. As you craft your story, make it a point to experiment
with opposites and seek out surprise: publicly fastidious lawyer has a messy
closet; pious church deacon has a gay lover; bucolic setting becomes the home
of a serial killer. – Nancy Lamb (The Art
and Craft of Storytelling)
22. When in doubt, or wherever possible, tell the whole
story of the novel in the first sentence. – John Irving
23. The writers of deep and beautiful works spend real time
gathering words. They learn the names of words and tools and types of roof.
They make lists of color words (ruby, scarlet, cranberry, brick). They savor
not only the meanings, but also the musicality of words. They are hunting
neither big words nor pompous words nor Latinate words but mainly words they
like. – Priscilla Long (The Writer’s
Portable Mentor)
24. Make yourself your intended reader. By writing to you as your reader, you get closer than
at any other time to getting your real voice on the page. You write naturally.
– Les Edgerton (Finding Your Voice: How
to Put Personality in Your Writing)
25. Writing is about honesty. It is almost impossible to be
honest and boring at the same time. – Julia Cameron
26. No matter what is going on in your life, know that ideal
situations are not necessary for finishing a book. People who succeed in life
do so because they have grit—the ability to work toward their goals whether
they feel like it or not. Laura Hillenbrand, the best-selling author of
Seabiscuit: An American Legend, has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. At times, she
could only write a paragraph or two a day. She had to perch her laptop on books
because looking down at the screen made the room spin. Yet she stuck with it.
Her grit—anchored in her passion for the topic—kept her writing. – Rochelle
Melander (Write-a-Thon)
27. As a young writer, I don’t think I really understood
that you need to prepare for writing;
I figured you could just sit down and begin. But I’ve come to see that I need
to be warmed up. I need to have something gestating in my head, even it’s just
a little niggling idea, unformed and unknowable until I start to lure it out. –
Brenda Miller and Holly J. Hughes (The
Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World)
28. If you want to engage in a vibrant conversation with the
wisdom that dwells just a hair below your conscious awareness, write. – Janet
Connor (Writing Down Your Soul)
29. Getting a novel written consists not of joyous rapture
but of applying your bottom to the chair and your fingers to the keyboard and
grinding things out word by word, sentence by sentence. You can whine or you
can write, but you can’t do both. – Todd A. Stone (Novelist’s Boot Camp)
30. The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to
write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best—write the story you
want to read. – Austin Kleon (Steal Like
an Artist)
31. People who are “ready” give off a different vibe from
people who aren’t. Animals can smell fear. And the lack thereof. The minute you
become ready is the minute you stop dreaming. Suddenly it’s no longer about
“becoming”. It’s about “doing”. You don’t get the dream job because you walk
into the editor’s office for the first time and go, “Hi, I would really like to
be a sportswriter one day, please.” You get the job because you walk into the
editor’s office and go, “Hi, I’m the best frickin’ sportswriter on the planet.”
And somehow the editor can tell you aren’t lying, either. You didn’t go in
there, asking the editor to give you power. You went in there and politely
informed the editor that you already have the power. That’s what being “ready”
means. That’s what “taking power” means. Not needing anything from another
person in order to be the best in the world. – Hugh MacLeod (Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to
Creativity)
32. Take the essence of your story and amp it. Add
characters and pile on the emotion. Playwrights used to limit the number of
characters in their stories, not wanting to crowd the stage. But when Williams
crams six or eight people onto the scene at once and sets them all at one
another’s throats, we get a chance to feel
their emotional claustrophobia and unwanted interdependence. Amp up your
action by adding cunning, vindictiveness, jealousy, fear of exposure,
stupidity, even death. – Elizabeth Sims (Writer’s
Digest November/December 2012)
33. If you want to be any kind of artist, you’ve got to have
that tenacity to keep beating your head against the wall…The idea of the
impossible is an illusion, and it will look very different on the other side.
It’s a matter of persevering. – Dave Cullen (Writer’s Digest October 2011)
34. “I don’t have enough time/people/experience”. Stop
whining. Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited
resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. There’s no room for waste.
And that forces you to be creative. Ever seen the weapons prisoners make out of
soap or a spoon? They make do with what they’ve got. Now we’re not saying that
you should go out and shank somebody—but get creative and you’ll be amazed at
what you can make with just a little. Shakespeare reveled in the limitations of
sonnets (fourteen-line lyric poems in iambic pentameter with a specific rhyme
scheme). Haiku and limericks also have strict rules that lead to creative
results. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver found that forcing
themselves to use simple, clear language helped them deliver maximum impact. –
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (Rework)
35. No one says you have to write your book in strict
chronological order. Some writers start at the end and write their way back to
the beginning. Or they write one complete plot strand, getting completely
immersed in all its possibilities and the personalities involved. When that’s
done, they write another complete strand, and another. Then they chop them all
together like rough-cutting a movie. – Roz Morris (Nail Your Novel)
36. Each piece you complete is an act of faith in the
process and value of creativity, a great big Molly Bloom yes to your curious,
creative, courageous side. – Bonni Goldberg
37. Technique alone is never enough. You have to have
passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder. – Raymond Chandler
38. I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered
life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within. –
Eudora Welty
39. Bam. Bam. Bam. That’s what this writing thing feels like
sometimes. But you get up and keep hitting back. You have to know, going in,
that you need to develop rhino skin to survive. The good news is you can develop it. Every time you come
back from a setback and write some more,
you create a little more of that protective coating, that inner strength. So if
you can look at the big picture, with all the odds stacked against you…if you
can understand full well that you will be taking hit after hit…if you can
understand all that and still have that inner ferret that says, “write, dang
you!”—then no, you shouldn’t quit. – James Scott Bell (Writing Fiction for All Your Worth)
40. Once we have begun it, we continue reading a novel
largely because we care about what happens to the character. But for us
actually to care about these actors in the drama on these printed pages, they
must become real people to us. An event alone cannot hold a story together. Nor
can a series of events. Only characters effecting
events and events affecting
characters can do that. – Elizabeth George (Write
Away: One Writer’s Approach to the Novel)
41. A story must have the ability to engender a sense of
urgency from the first sentence. Everything else—fabulous characters, great
dialogue, vivid imagery, luscious language—is gravy. This is not to disparage
great writing in any way. I love a beautifully crafted sentence as much as the
next person. But make no mistake: learning to “write well” is not synonymous
with learning to write a story. And of the two, writing well is secondary.
Because if the reader doesn’t want to know what happens next, so what if it’s
well written? In the trade, such exquisitely rendered, story-less novels are
often referred to as a beautifully written “Who cares?” – Lisa Cron (Wired for Story)
42. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m
looking at, what I see and what it means. In many ways writing is the act of
saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive,
even a hostile act. There’s no getting around the fact that setting words on
paper is the tactic of a bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s
sensibility on the reader’s most private space. – Joan Didion (The New York Times Book Review)
43. I write to make peace with the things I cannot control.
I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write
to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a
dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things
differently perhaps the world will change. – Terry Tempest Williams (Northern Lights magazine)
44. To create a novel’s emotional landscape you must first
open yourself to your own. That’s hard to do. If it’s difficult to confide your
feelings to those close to you, consider how much more fearful it is to do with
strangers. But that’s what you’re doing whether you’re aware of it or not.
There is wired inside you a terror of exposing yourself to embarrassment,
shame, and ridicule. But here you are writing fiction. Are you nuts? Or, more
to the point, is that what people will think of you when they read your work?
The inhibiting effect of shame cannot be overstated. It explains why some
writers slide into genre clichés or literary imitation. To put authentic
emotions on the page, you need to own them. When you do, readers will respect
you. Its’ when you hide that readers feel shortchanged, cheated, and only
minimally involved. – Donald Maass (Writing
21st Century Fiction)
45. As a man who has knocked about the arts for some time, I
can only say that in the presence of a poet I am struck with awe that I should
behold so courageous a man. I never felt that way about generals or admirals,
for our society is organized to protect the warrior. – James A. Michener
46. Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also
a destroyer of life, or hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded
road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a
well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a
railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. – William Strunk
and E.B. White (The Elements of Style)
47. Writers kid themselves—about themselves and other
people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work—there’s no
secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes—it is just work. – Sinclair
Lewis
48. Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all
those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the
melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human condition. –Graham
Greene
49. The art of writing
cannot be taught, but the craft of
writing can. No one can teach you how to tap inspiration, how to gain vision
and sensibility, but you can be taught to write lucidly, to present what you
say in the most articulate and forceful way. Vision itself is useless without
the technical means to record it. – Noah Lukeman (The First Five Pages)
50. Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if
you must, then write. If it all feels hopeless, if that famous “inspiration”
will not come, write. If you are a genius, you’ll make your own rules, but if
not—and the odds are against it—go to your desk, not matter what your mood,
face the icy challenge of the paper—write. – J.B. Priestly
51. The idea of “inspiration”, as it’s commonly understood,
does a great deal of damage to writers. For one thing, it devalues craft, which I think is the most
important part of writing. It also, as I’ve cautioned before, reinforces the
notion that the writer himself or herself is somehow not enough. That some
special talent or knowledge or divine gift—something outside of the writer—is
necessary. – Dennis Palumbo (Writing from
the Inside Out)
52. Almost all good writing begins with terrible first
efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down
on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just
get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say
what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft,
where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or
even, God help us, healthy. – Anne Lamott (Bird
by Bird)
53. This is the ultimate magic trick of language: to evoke
in the reader not just an understanding of the thing described but the
sensation of it. It’s not enough just to tell a reader the thing exists and ask
him to take its existence on faith; you must allow him to experience it for
himself. – Joseph Bates (The Nighttime
Novelist)
54. When the conditions are right, live things creep up. The
author does not need to airlift them in. No need to insert a reptile here,
something symbolic over there. The most potent meaning arises indigenously. It
looks like earth, like mud, like a log. The more your eyes discern the
particulars of the physical world and its inhabitants, the more meaningful your
work becomes. This is the meaning that, when it’s laid dormant in the sun long
enough, strikes with a devouring force…To write well, we must sink into the
silt of this world. – Bonnie Friedman (Writing
Past Dark)
55. Every day you are afraid. Every day you move through
fear to your desk, and as soon as you pick up your pen, or read the sentence
left over from the night before, incomplete, needing an adjustment in rhythm—a
stronger verb, a slash of color or the taste of bitter herbs—in that moment of
solving the problems, all fear dissolves. You are writing again. – Sophy
Burnham (For Writers Only)
56. The best time for planning a book is while you are doing
the dishes. – Agatha Christie
57. In his ambrosial book Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury answers the pestering
questions he gets about the origins of his ideas emphasizing the daily need to
move forward. “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The
landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the
pieces back together”. He does this in a surprisingly simple fashion, by
venturing into his museum-like writing studio and fingering one of his
thousands of travel souvenirs, or opening a dictionary and choosing a single
world. He then seizes the memory, emotion, or word and, as Klee said, takes it
out for a walk—which invariably results in a story he didn’t even know he had
in him. The operative word, again, is seize,
as in the moment, our destiny as creative souls. – Phil Cousineau (Stoking the Creative Fires)
58. The place of stillness that you have to go to write, but
also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible
decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary
and unmanageable world. – Jonathan Franzen
59. Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and
not giving a damn. – Gore Vidal
60. I’m not sure if it takes deep denial or courage to sit
at one’s desk day after day doing this. In the middle of my writing career, I
once studied to go into a different profession; the main lure was having a desk
out of the house and coworkers. Not to mention a regular paycheck. I studied
for two years and had a good time doing this job, but I couldn’t get over the
sense of not being in my own skin and had to quit. – Barbara Abercrombie (A Year of Writing Dangerously)
61. Remember, nobody is born a professional. So this stuff
has to be learned and practiced. Stephen King used to be some guy who had a
traumatic experience in his childhood. Janet Evanovich did not always have her
face plastered across a bus. There was a time when no one knew what a muggle was, not even J.K. Rowling. These
writers and, indeed, all writers, were once simply somebody’s baby—a mother’s son,
a father’s daughter, and then, eventually, they became writers. At some point
thereafter, they became darn good writers, and then even farther down the road
they became the writers we know and love today. Writing is work, just like many
other kinds of work that require a certain amount of artfulness and intuition.
And the more willingly you acknowledge the more well-rounded qualities of the
writing life, the better you will far. – Christina Katz (The Writer’s Workout)
62. A person who publishes a book willfully appears before
the populace with his pants down… If it is a good book, nothing can hurt him.
If it is a bad book, nothing can help him. – Edna St. Vincent Millay
63. When a reader fully believes our story, both
intellectually and emotionally, he moves in and unpacks his bags. No longer a
tourist living out of a suitcase, ordering room service and watching
suspiciously from his hotel window as the natives bustle on the street below,
he has become, for the moment at least, a native himself. He changes into
comfortable clothes, strolls the avenues, eats in open-air cafes, even tries
the local catch-of-the-day. He turns another page in the book. Anything is
possible. Who knows? He might even fall in love. – Rebecca McClanahan (Word Painting)
64. If you won’t enjoy reading it, you won’t enjoy writing
it. – Chris Baty (No Plot? No Problem!)
65. There’s a certain charm in what is spontaneous. I want
the reader to feel that I’m telling the story to him or her in particular. When
you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it’s full of mistakes and
repetitions. I try to avoid that in literature, but I still want it to be a
conversation, like storytelling usually is. It’s not a lecture. – Isabel
Allende (Why We Write)
66. You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write
badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a
way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well. –
Jennifer Egan (Why We Write)
67. Writers make their way toward intensity via soul-jarring
themes, stories awash in peril, characters on the edge, smoldering conflict,
manic introspection, inflamed dialogue, and other such strategies. But the foot
soldiers along the march are words and their style of delivery: words that
advance steadily until, at key moments, they gather force to penetrate the
reader’s armored resistance. – Arthur Plotnik (The Elements of Expression)
68. If you feel comfortable telling people about your novel
in advance, more power to you, but be aware that you might be affected by their
responses. If they give you too much praise, will you feel the weight of trying
to live up to their expectations? Will this energize your writing or give you
writer’s block? If the response is reserved or negative, will you doubt the
value of your story? Will a cool response diminish your own love for the idea?
If you think the work might be damaged by poor reactions and if you can live
without the instant gratification of advertising your novel before it is
written, protect the process of writing your book by keeping it to yourself. –
Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb (Your
First Novel)
69. Seeing sharply and accurately is part of the contract
the author makes with the reader. When we talk about a writer’s vision, we’re
usually talking metaphorically…but we’re most persuaded by an author who
literally has an acuity of vision. – Tony Eprile (Poets & Writers, March/April 2013)
70. It is an immutable law of the universe that humans
simply cannot, under any circumstances, no matter how hard they try, be
completely objective about what they’ve written. That’s why, once you finish a
draft of your proposal or manuscript, it’s important to let it sit and ferment,
marinate and settle. Move away from your work for a bit. This will help you with
your objectivity. In fact, there’s a direct correlation between the amount of
objectivity you can achieve and the time you spend away from your material. –
Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry (The
Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published)
71. Every writer aims to immerse the reader so deeply into
the story, to so hypnotize the reader with the details and the writing, that
she continues turning the pages. You want your reader to feel like she’s
literally present in your fictional world, running right alongside your
characters as they get swept up in the action of the story. This is, after all,
one of the reasons people read: to lose themselves in a world more interesting
than their own. – Sarah Domet (90 Days to
Your Novel)
72. Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will
sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and
polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. habit is persistence in practice. –
Octavia Butler
73. I warm up and break through the ice called writer’s
block by writing poetry. If I can’t come up with a topic for a poem, I’ll look
at the headlines in newspapers or magazines and find something to write a poem
about. Once I write the poem, I’m ready to return to the longer work like a
short story or novel. – Lloyd Lofthouse
74. Only kings, editors, and people with tapeworm have the
right to use the editorial “we”. – Mark Twain
75. Forget the boring old dictum “write what you know”.
Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that’s going to
enhance your understanding of the world and write about that. – Rose Tremain
76. I type in one place, but I write all over the house. –
Toni Morrison
77. What to do with your dreams? Some of us mumble them to
our families over breakfast or dinner. Others write them down in a dream
journal. Jacquelyn Mitchard took one of her dreams and molded it into the
best-selling novel The Deep End of the
Ocean. Author Stephanie Meyer was a mom and a homemaker when she had a
dream that became the basis for her best-selling Twilight series. – Rochelle Melander (Write-a-Thon)
78. A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one
not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives us
the right to dream. – Gaston Bachelard
79. Write something to suit yourself and many people will
like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for
it. – Jesse Stuart
80. What works for one writer becomes paralyzing for the
next. – Karen E. Peterson
81. One telling detail will take you further than a page of
description. – Michael Connelly
82. Most beginning writers (and I was the same) are like
chefs trying to cook great dishes that they’ve never tasted themselves. How can
you make a great (or even adequate) bouillabaisse if you’ve never had any? If
you don’t really understand why people read mysteries (or romances or literary
novels or thrillers or whatever), then there’s no way in the world you’re going
to write one that anyone wants to publish. – Daniel Quinn
83. Stories move people to think and act. Anais Nin said,
“What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar
scene, and as if by magic, we see new meanings in it.” Art, in the form of a
story well told, may literally transform the reader and the culture from the
inside out. “A book ought to be an ice pick to beak up the frozen sea within
us”, said Franz Kafka. Stories hold the power to transform the very society
they are said to reflect, making storytelling among the highest of callings. –
Elizabeth Lyon (A Writer’s Guide to
Fiction)
84. I’m a full-time believer in writing habits. You may be
able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and
this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and
mental habits or it dries up and blows away. – Flannery O’Connor
85. Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the
quality of deeds. – Elie Wiesel
86. Writing longhand will help you experience your writing
in a different way. Your mind will think in a different manner, both because
writing longhand is a slower process and also because you won’t have the
opportunity to backspace and erase the words you’ve just written. Writing in
longhand is a more deliberate act. There is an elegant simplicity to writing
longhand: it takes writing back to a primal and pleasing place. As an added
incentive, there’s also a sense of instant gratification. The moment you make a
mark, it is real. Unlike the sometimes dicey business of storing your writing
on a computer’s hard drive, the handwritten page won’t disappear into a
mysterious Ethernet void. – Amy Peters (The
Writer’s Devotional)
87. I believe more in scissors than I do in the pencil. –
Truman Capote
88. Mining the places you have lived can be a great way to
unearth ideas. Too often we feel that the places we were born and raised lack
the sort of exoticism that will attract readers. We think this because the
places are not exotic to us. We take them for granted. I was born and raised in
Ohio, which is synonymous with,
even symbolic of, bland America.
Of course, what is ordinary to us can be exotic to someone else. The key is
being able to truly see the world around you, finding the details that evoke
it. A world that is keenly evoked will be exotic to those who don’t know it
well and will allow those who do know it well to see it with fresh eyes. – Jack
Heffron (The Writer’s Idea Book)
89. Everything that I have written has the closest possible
connection with what I have lived through inwardly. – Henrik Ibsen
90. First, there is the writing, then the exhilaration from
feeling good about writing, then the guilt for the time spent writing when
there are a dozen other obligations that should be met. So what’s the appeal?
Why torture yourself? The appeal is that you are burning to say something, to
express yourself, to make someone feel happy or sad or angry or just laugh. The
appeal is that you believe what you have to say can make a difference in
someone’s life, and you just might reach a bigger audience and impact several
lives. You are the only one who can say what you have to say in just your way.
And if it’s something powerful, something that can improve humanity or bring
insights or change the world, or make people think or laugh—then why feel
guilty? What are you waiting for? Get busy writing. – Nancy Ellen Dodd (The Writer’s Compass)
91. I don’t necessarily start with the beginning of the
book. I just start with the part of the story that’s most vivid in my
imagination and work forward and backward from there. – Beverly
Cleary
92. Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as
possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as
a small triumph. Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying
about quality. Do feel anxiety—it’s the job. – Roddy Doyle
93. It’s necessary to write, if the days are not to slip
emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?
For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.
That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his
mind on the hop. – Vita Sackville-West
94. If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I
wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. – Isaac Asimov
95. Even with descriptions that have nothing to do with
character emotion, there are ways you can show rather than tell. Rather than
telling your readers that your hero’s car is an old broken down wreck, you can
show him twisting two bare wires together to turn on the headlights, or driving
through a puddle and being sprayed from the holes on the floor. That way your
readers can draw their own conclusions about the car’s condition for
themselves. – Renni Browne and Dave King (Self-Editing
for Fiction Writers)
96. In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the
good, and praise it. – Alex Haley
97. One of my theories about writing is that the process
involves an ongoing interchange between Left Brain and Right. The journal
provides a testing ground where the two can engage. Left Brain is analytical,
linear, the timekeeper, the bean counter, the critic and editor, a valuable
ally in the shaping of the mystery novel or any piece of writing for that
matter. Right Brain is creative, spatial, playful, disorganized, dazzling, nonlinear,
the source of the Aha! or imaginative leap. Without Right Brain, there would be
no material for Left Brain to refine. Without Left Brain, the jumbled
brilliance of Right Brain would never coalesce into a satisfactory whole. – Sue
Grafton (Writing the Private Eye Novel)
98. If your whole reason for writing is to pontificate on,
for example, the dangers of certain habits or lifestyles, you risk sounding
preaching…If your theme is the danger of alcoholism, simply tell a story in
which an alcoholic suffers because of his bad decisions and give the reader
credit. If your story is powerful enough, your theme will come through. – Jerry
B. Jenkins (Writer’s Digest, August
2006)
99. I know writers who write only when inspiration comes.
How would Isaac Stern play if he played the violin only when he felt like it?
He would be lousy. – Madeleine L’Engle
100. Writing genre fiction is a calling more prone to
humiliation than most fields of creative endeavor. Yes, we face the same
rejections from agents and publishers, the mortification of being asked if we
write under our own names, the shame of events where only two people turn up.
But we also face the indignity of being one of a bunch in the review section’s
crime round up. And possible worst of all, the perennial question: “Have you
ever thought of writing a proper novel?” – Val McDermid (Motification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame)
101. I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I
could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. – Cormac
McCarthy
102. I never knew what was meant by “finding your voice”.
Not for ages. I think I now know. I believe it means finding a way to write
what is comfortable for you. It’s finding the method to tell your story that
seems natural and unaffected. That way you’re not going to get caught out all
the time trying to keep up with some kind of style that you think may be
appropriate. – Maeve Binchy (The Mave
Binchy Writer’s Club)
103. And writing a book may take you the same amount of time
as it does to build a house. Having a long project that will need to transpire
over time has its own advantages: as it goes along, it will become a measure of
your capacity to stick to this often-thankless-feeling work. It will also
continually teach you new things. Your novel will tell you things you never
knew about your own soul, these being those truths known so far by no one else
but you. – Jane Vandenburgh (Architecture
of the Novel
104. Good writing is remembering detail most people want to
forget. Don’t forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn
them into a story that tells the truth. – Paula Danzinger
105. Carry a heavy rock around with you (in your purse,
backpack, or briefcase) to represent your barriers, fears, or problems in your
writing. Carry it for several days until you become really annoyed with the
burden. Then—without getting caught—place the rock in the garden of someone who
annoys you. Or, on a more positive note, throw the rock in a lake and enjoy
watching your fears symbolically sink out of sight. – Bill O’Hanlon (Write is a Verb)
106. I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career
that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. –
Harper Lee
107. You have to follow your own voice. You have to be
yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, “This is me, this is
what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I’m doing the best I
can—buy me or not—but this is who I am as a writer.” – David Morrell
108. We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. If we
can’t make up stories about ordinary people, who can we make them up about?
…Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to
find ways to make them interesting. – John Updike
109. You better make them care about what you think. It had
better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in
them. Otherwise it doesn’t work. I mean we’ve all read pieces where we thought,
“Oh, who gives a damn”. – Nora Ephron
110. In truth, I never consider the audience for whom I’m
writing. I just write what I want to write. – J. K. Rowling
111. The most important thing is you can’t write what you
wouldn’t read for pleasure. It’s a mistake to analyze the market thinking you
can write whatever is hot. You can’t say you’re going to write romance when you
don’t even like it. You need to write what you would read if you expect anybody
else to read it. – Nora Roberts
Janet Boyer (JanetBoyer.com)
is the author of The Back in Time Tarot
Book (Hampton Roads) which features her innovative Back in Time (BIT)
Method for experiencing the cards through memories, favorite books, songs and
movies. Featuring over 100 journaling exercises and fun anecdotes from personal
stories, literature, film and world events, Back
in Time Tarot was chosen the #8 book of 2008 by One Spirit Book Club
Editors, along with Deepak Chopra and other respected Mind/Body/Spirit authors. Her
second book, Tarot in Reverse
(Schiffer Publishing), explains the upside down cards in a Tarot spread in an
entertaining, accessible manner and includes pop culture anecdotes, hundreds of
key phrases and 1,650 affirmations (20 for each card). Her third traditionally
published book, Naked Tarot, is
forthcoming from Dodona Books. Janet is also the author of over a dozen eBooks.
The Snowland Deck,
co-created with her artist husband, Ron, is available now at http://SnowlandDeck.com This frosty,
child-friendly deck is a perfect companion for children, kidults, writers,
creatives and therapists.
An Amazon.com Hall of Fame reviewer, Janet has written over a thousand
reviews, articles and interviews for both print and online publications, specializing
in Mind/Body/Spirit topics.
Janet makes her home in the gorgeous state of Pennsylvania with her soulmate, Ron, and their teenage
son (whom she homeschools).
Recent Comments