Rules Of Writing Quotes

The four rules of writing ... 1. Write to discover. 2. There is no greater discovery than love. 3. All love comes from the Creator. 4. Write what you will. ~ Ted Dekker

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic. ~ Raymond Chandler

If you have a simply swell story in mind, you can forget the rules. A swell story takes care of itself. ~ Louise Dickinson Rich

One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing. ~ George R R Martin

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late. ~ Hilary Mantel

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write. ~ Ernest Gaines

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. ~ Elmore Leonard

Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

In the context of novel writing, this means you should lower the bar from "best-seller" to "would not make someone vomit." Exuberant imperfection encourages you to write uncritically, to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens. In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable. So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low. ~ Chris Baty

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. ~ Mark Twain

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment. ~ Steve Toltz

Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated. ~ William Zinsser

The existence of such an [international Islamic] army rules out the superpowers' interference in disputes among Muslim countries. ~ Mohsen Rezaee

The writing is always the easy part, provided I can get the good material. It's the getting of the good material that's a challenge. ~ Mary Roach

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin. ~ Virginia Woolf

Writing fantasy is like opening a door onto millions of people's dreams that they never knew they were having. ~ Michael Timmins

A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate. ~ Aristotle.

The gargantuan, ever-growing, ever-less-accountable, impossible-to-uproot federal bureaucracy is actually the sleeper issue of our time. It's at the heart of the conservative critique of modern government: faceless bureaucrats writing incomprehensible regulations that complicate our lives for no good reason. ~ Jim Geraghty

We never thought we were writing for posterity, because at the time everyone assumed that all the great standards had already been written by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein ... The songs we were writing were supposed to be temporary things, of the period, like comic books. ~ Mike Stoller

I could be accused of glamourising crime, the favorite question on all journalists' lips whenever they ask about anyone writing about such things. The answer to that must be an emphatic 'Yes'. We've come to expect our icons of the criminal world to be larger than life, better than anyone else at foiling the final capture scene. We all love a good thriller .... ~ Stephen Richards

Writing is like breathing underwater. It's really hard to do unless you can imagine yourself a nice set of gills. ~ Alane Adams

Having deadlines helps because people are constantly breathing down my neck, and tapping their toes waiting for pages. So I just have to work nine to five. If I didn't have deadlines then I might be more of a golden hour kind of guy, writing from eight to noon and calling it a day, but that's just not the way I work right now. ~ David Lindsay-Abaire

... true love had seemed like the grand prize, the one thing that could weather any storm, save you from both drudgery and fear, and writing about it had felt like the single most meaningful gift I could ever give.
And even if that part of my worldview was taking a brief sabbatical, it had to be true that sometimes, heartbroken women found their happy endings, their rain-falling, music-swelling moments of pure happiness. ~ Emily Henry

O God, the creature knows not to what end Thou hast made Him; teach him, and write in the depths of his soul that the clay must suffer itself to be shaped at the will of the potter. ~ Francois Fenelon

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. ~ William Carlos Williams

I know there's a lot of competition in the world of magazines and newspapers and we have to make headlines and be sensational and sell, and saying bad things about me is going to sell more papers than writing good things about me. ~ Madonna Ciccone

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted. ~ Joseph Campbell

I think the goal with any writing, but especially narrative nonfiction, is to put the blockade of putting your thoughts in this unnatural medium of print and then trying to reach through that and actually convey what's going on, what you think, and make people laugh and recognize themselves while doing it. Definitely the laughing thing. ~ Sloane Crosley

This is the reason I write, to remind people of honor and courage; to tell them that their cause isn't lost, that their destiny is victory. ~ Charles M. Blow

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic. ~ Jean Sibelius

One of the most important rules for success is this: Every great success is the result of hundreds and thousands of small efforts and accomplishments that no one sees or appreciates. ~ Brian Tracy

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now. ~ Alison Bechdel

I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels. ~ Eileen Myles

There's a lot of people I'd like to write with, like Keith Urban or even as far out as Stevie Wonder. ~ Hunter Hayes

Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions. ~ Susan Cain

My children used to occasionally ask me to proofread English papers for them. The difficulty, for me, was in just proofreading. I could see all kinds of ways they could make the paper better. But I didn't volunteer my ideas, because I was afraid that then they would lose the self-confidence and sense of accomplishment they had gotten from writing the paper. Better to let their teacher make the suggestions, if she was so inclined, since kids expect English teachers to make suggestions. You need to keep your long-term goals firmly in mind. Children who are enthusiastic about working will, sooner or later, do much better work than kids who just grind out assignments because someone is standing over them. ~ Mary Leonhardt

We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth - if such a thing can even be said to exist. ~ Isaac Asimov

I write about the emotional crises that we face in our lives. Readers tell me that they identify with my characters. They know them. They are them. I'm an everyday woman writing about everyday people facing not- so-everyday challenges. And believe me, I love readers like you to bits. I've built my career one reader at a time. I owe a dept of gratitude to you all! ~ Barbara Delinsky

I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs. ~ Stephen Vincent Benet

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be. ~ Ayn Rand

Basically what you're doing when you're writing fiction is telling a lie, he tells those of us in the seminar; and the psychology of reading dictates that we're willing to buy only what coheres, on some gut level, with what we already believe. ~ David Foster Wallace

I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay's dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile. ~ Mario Benedetti

With respect to the distribution of your time the following is what I should approve. from 8. to 10 o'clock practise music. from 10. to 1. dance one day & draw another. from 1. to 2. draw on the day you dance, and write a letter next day. from 3. to 4. read French. from 4. to 5. exercise ... ~ Thomas Jefferson

I don't go to church. Not anymore. I'm a lot of things, but a hypocrite really isn't one of them. If you're not going to play by the rules, you don't show up for team meetings. ~ Emma Chase

Indeed I do belong to that dreadful class of persons known as the reclusive writer – the existential writer. For the existential writer as you probably already do know, life is never about whether to write but whether he can survive without writing. As a matter of fact not being able to do any writing at all would be such a painful life. He must write or simply perish. ~ Rotimi Ogunjobi

Most of the pain we experience, whether we realize it or not, comes from the fantasies we live in.
We create our own worlds, where there are certain rules, things to be done and said and events to happen. And every time that doesn't go according to the plan (which, basically, means anything because we have no control over what might happen and can't predict it), we panic. ~ Lidiya K.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it. ~ John Ciardi

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things. ~ Hilary Mantel

We write for actors and even down to the smallest character in the film, they all have their moment. You take that and you put it in a story that's in your face and there's tons of hardcore R action, nudity and you name it, but at the same time there really is a story there. It's got heart and at the end of the movie people will feel it. So I hope they'll their friends and want to see more. ~ Todd Farmer

To the most inconsiderate asshole of a friend,
I'm writing you this letter because I know that if I say what I have to say
to your face I will probably punch you.
I don't know you anymore.
I don't see you anymore.
All I get is a quick text or a rushed e-mail from you every few days. I
know you are busy and I know you have Bethany, but hello? I'm supposed to
be your best friend.
You have no idea what this summer has been like. Ever since we were
kids we pushed away every single person that could possibly have been our
friend. We blocked people until there was only me and you. You probably
haven't noticed, because you have never been in the position I am in now.
You have always had someone. You always had me. I always had you. Now
you have Bethany and I have no one.
Now I feel like those other people that used to try to become our friend,
that tried to push their way into our circle but were met by turned backs. I
know you're probably not doing it deliberately just as we never did it deliberately.
It's not that we didn't want anyone else, it's just that we didn't need
them. Sadly now it looks like you don't need me anymore.
Anyway I'm not moaning on about how much I hate her, I'm just trying
to tell you that I miss you. And that well . . . I'm lonely.
Whenever you cancel nights out I end up staying home with Mum and
Dad watching TV. It's so depressing. This was supposed ~ Cecelia Ahern

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I try to combine in my paintings cinematic feeling, emotional feeling, and sometimes actually writing on the page to combine all the different elements of communication. ~ Sylvester Stallone

Over the years, there certainly have been plenty of ideas that I've had and given up on, but for this one, the only thing that was standing in its way was me doing it - I just had to write it ... And then if it didn't happen, it didn't happen. But I didn't want it to be for lack of effort on my part, so I had hunch that it would be a good story and that we would work well together. And it certainly worked out that way. ~ Paul Reiser

Aberjhani's writing blows the mind and frees the psyche of any rigid assumptions about ancestral heritage. Here, our collective experience is starkly rendered. The transparency of one culture overlays another, and another, to form the daguerreotype of possibilities that is homo sapiens, interacting, almost like the elements themselves, with the created world and modified only by context and its imperatives. ~ Rosy Cole

Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's. ~ Ron Rash

It's a huge Carthusian monastery, stuck down between rocks and sea, where you may imagine me, without white gloves or hair curling, as pale as ever, in a cell with such doors as Paris never had for gates. The cell is the shape of a tall coffin, with an enormous dusty vaulting, a small window ... Bach, my scrawls and waste paper - silence - you could scream - there would still be silence. Indeed, I write to you from a strange place. ~ Frederic Chopin