Don Roff Quotes

If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.

Audiences will admire your character's strength but connect with them through their weakness.

It's better to write something, anything, than to starve the monster. The monster must feed. And it will feed on your soul if not your words. Its appetite is insatiable. Write to save yourself from the monster.

Writing is dreaming with your eyes open - and your heart on fire.

There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin; the second is never to finish.

You cannot write your character until you know how he or she thinks, until you know what their philosophy is in the world that they occupy.

Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode.

The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.

Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.

Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat - chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange.

Love it when a compelling new character kicks open your mental door, tracks mud across your brain, and props their feet up on your cerebrum.

Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

Creativity and intelligence, rather than violence, are the best problem solvers.

But people in a small town tend to do a lot of talking, even when they don't know what they're talking about.

A migraine is the cockblock of writing.

Sometimes the wind made her feel like she was not alone. The icy blasts there seemed to whisper and call her name; they had done so tonight. Not only whispered her name but told her to do it. A frigid voice from somewhere in those January howls had told her to kill them, kill them all.

Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.

Kindness, motherfucker, kindness.

Mothman flew away from town, like a giant bat, and then disappeared from sight behind a thicket of skeletal autumn trees.

Always work with/surround yourself with people who help make you a better version of you. Kindly avoid those who don't.

If you don't love what you're writing, stop right now: it's not worth your time and certainly not the reader's.

The central message of the Clare series, I think, is not to underestimate or marginalize those who you deem weaker or different than yourself as you have no idea what they're capable of. You never know – those of whom you relentlessly persecute may just end up killing you.

I don't use big words to show off because it's ostentatious.

When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.

Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.

There was talk of the Centaur being moved into the elephant cages to make room for a banjo-picking Minotaur. Surrendering his meager furnishings to a musical half man half bull was all bull.

Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere.

A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.

When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.

When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.