Writers Craft Quotes

I think the biggest advice I can offer is don't just pick one story and stop, write as much as you can, as many stories as you can. The best thing about being a writer is, a writer's craft is nearly perfect because a writer can go anywhere and do his craft. ~ Dwayne McDuffie

Collaboration is a nice change of pace from the often solitary nature of the writer's craft. ~ Edward M. Lerner

The writer's craft, explained!

I have stood on the shores of imagination, gazing at a sea of dreams.
It is a lonely place, for not many can stand on that shifting sand and call it home.
I can see others who also weave a web of dreams and will share them.
We are called storytellers and we alone have that gift that feed the needs of the many.
We are a strange family, united in our separate talents and bonded by our willingness to share.
The price we pay, is a dependence on others, reaching out to listen to our stories.
WE must never forget our need for the herd or they will forget us!
There is no savage punishment for such as we, than to be easily forgotten!
This is our greatest fear and all of us share that terror.
So write brothers and sisters, write and bare your souls without fear.
If you are good enough, they will listen and they will remember you.
Its all we can ask! ~ Barry Woodham

What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape. ~ Fennel Hudson

I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer. ~ Antonia Fraser

This is the same establishment that all those who want, or rather aspire to, to be literary figures of the century, artists, painters and sculptors want acceptance from and approval. They want to be looked up to. Young and upcoming poets must approach their craft with an almost angelic perspective. So many writers are missing a condensed fusion in their writing, they condescend to their audience, the truth is not spoken in their work, they gabble, their words seem to make a hot fuss on the page. What do they gain? They gain this, simply nothing. Poets must assemble and present their work accordingly to how they see fit and should be careful of advice from other writers and editors. Sometimes there can be too much going on in the words that are meant to be given with the best of intentions. ~ Abigail George

Developing your voice takes ...
time and practice. ~ Darynda Jones

Where the writing takes place doesn't matter to a publisher, but it matters a great deal to the author. ~ Fennel Hudson

Give me an old house full of memories and I will give you hundred novels! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. ~ Paul Rudnick

What I didn't know that by sticking to craft we would blow open some doors that I never saw opened before. ~ James Lipton

No-one knows your mind better than you do. ~ Rusty Blackwood

Whoever looks for the writer's thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer's "thoughts" violates the richness of the mixture that is the very hallmark of the novel. The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist.

The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make - their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an aspect of reality previously unexamined in the way that he conducts an examination. The thought of the writer is embedded everywhere in the course of the novel's action. The thought of the writer is figured invisibly in the elaborate pattern - in the newly emerging constellation of imagined things - that is the architecture of the book: what Aristotle called simply "the arrangement of the parts," the "matter of size and order." The thought of the novel is embodied in the moral focus of the novel. The tool with which the novelist thinks is the scrupulosity of his style. Here, in all this, lies whatever magnitude his thought may have.

The novel, then, is in itself his mental world. A novel ~ Philip Roth

The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Actors are good liars, writers are good liars with good memories. ~ Daniel Keys Moran

Argentina's like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best. Buenos Aires is full of crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but the pampas - the pampas are eternal. A limitless cemetery, that's what they're like. ~ Roberto Bolano

There are probably many, many people who are better writers than me. ~ Nicolle Wallace

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The whole world of 'Game of Thrones' was realized with such detail, with directors and writers who really geeked out and really loved all the little bits of it. ~ Harry Lloyd

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of tho ~ G.K. Chesterton

Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America's literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world. ~ Lorin Stein

Space opera, as every reader doubtless knows, is a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of space opera is over and done, thank goodness, and that henceforth these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favor - closet dramas, psychological dramas, sex dramas, etc., but by God important dramas, containing nothing but Big Thinks. Ten years late, the writer in question may or may not still be around, but the space opera can be found right where it always was, sturdily driving its dark trade in heroes. ~ Leigh Brackett

It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Musicians have blocks, just like writers do. You'll find your muse again. ~ Colleen Hoover

Accuracy first," I used to tell the writers. "We must never lie by accident, or through slovenliness, only deliberately! ~ Sefton Delmer

The problem with taxation is that authors can't write off whiskey as a business expense. ~ Bryan Way

Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely. ~ Greg Egan

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless. ~ Amy Bloom

What are we to make of the stubborn bitter truth that one's legitimacy is judged by whether one appears to be 'happy' or 'unhappy'; that one's work is somehow assessed in terms of the spiritual uplift it offers? 'Happiness' is predicated as a cultural norm, so that any deviation from it, however justified, however inescapable, arouses not only pity but reproach. As true as this might be for male writers, it is all the more true for female writers, since there is a violation of some unspoken rule in the very fact that a woman writes - that is, thinks. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

France is very welcoming to foreign writers. ~ Israel Horovitz

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I'll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction - until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define "literature". The Latin root simply means "letters". Those letters are either delivered - they connect with an audience - or they don't. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that's because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books - and thus what they count as literature - really tells you more about them than it does about the book. ~ Brent Weeks

Writers are generally anonymous. It just that I think I got out there because I also act as well and put myself in my films. ~ Kevin Grevioux

People should think that being a writer is cool. Even if you're just a starving writer. Besides, most great writers were starving at one point or another. It comes with the title. ~ Zack Love

We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Horror fans are very passionate people, and they are very much into the 'Saw' thing. So they watch sometimes as carefully as the writers and producers do, in terms of the way the story plays out. ~ Tobin Bell

I write a lot from instinct. But as you're writing out of instinct, once you reach a certain level as a songwriter, the craft is always there talking to you in the back of your head ... that tells you when it's time to go to the chorus, when it's time to rhyme. Real basic craft ... it's second nature. ~ Janis Ian

I think Star Trek has been very double-edged for all of us - as actors, writers, directors. ~ Jonathan Frakes

A common question asked of writers is "When did you decide to become a writer?" The answer, of course, is that we didn't decide anything. It was decided for us. I firmly believe that mythical godmothers make appearances at our cradles, and bestow their gifts. The godmother who might have blessed me with a singing voice did not show up; the goddess of dance was nowhere in sight; the chef-to-the-angels was otherwise engaged. Only one made the journey to my cradle, and she whispered, "You will be a storyteller." ~ Mary Higgins Clark