Writing Advice Process Quotes

Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library. ~ John Waters

Write freely and with feeling. ~ Dee Lopez

In reading we live hundreds lives, in writing we live thousands of lives. ~ R.M. Donaldson

Write what you love. Passion is the key to a good story. ~ R.M. Donaldson

When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it. ~ Alvi Syahrin

I think if a writer is being honest they'd admit to a file full of a dozen or more stories that are all started to varying degrees. They're like the kid who wants to be a firefighter and a police officer and an astronaut. ~ Dan Alatorre

Authorpreneurship is the businesses side of writing ~ Bernard Kelvin Clive

Doing what you love is a sacred life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It's okay to write crap. Just don't try publishing it while it's still crap. ~ S.M. Blooding

Graft at your craft! ~ Andrew Thomas

You're allowed to manipulate the environment, but not the character. ~ Sean Platt

In fact, "talent" is as common as mud; what's rare is the motivation to sit down and actually do something with one's talent, the discipline to do it regularly, and the persistence to stick with it until it's finished. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation. ~ Stephen King

Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well. ~ Germaine Greer

Avoid generalizations. As a fiction writer, I distrust absolute truths, homilies, bromides, sound bites, and also shorthand advice of the sort I'm giving. I like specifics, the longhand version of a story in which it takes four hundred pages to answer a single question about a person's character. Literary writers, unless they are writing fairly tales, learn early never to have characters who are polar opposites, one "good," the other "evil." That's not believable. People are more than just good and evil. Intelligent readers will demand that you not reduce people to such simplistic terms, or resolve situations with "Good always conquers evil," "Might is always right," and so forth. And while such resolutions are common in murder mysteries and action stories, they are feeble in literary fiction, which is supposed to reflect subtle truths about the world. Better to be subtle rather than overbearing, subversive rather than didactic. ~ Amy Tan

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. ~ Don Roff

Creativity takes courage. It takes courage to bare your soul for the world. It's like taking off your armor, although you know people have pointy sticks that they love to jab into soft flesh. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader. ~ Nancy Kress

Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets? ~ Raymond Carver

The living WORD, medicine for the soul. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Criticism is the best test of such work, for it will show her both unsuspected merits and faults, and help her to do better next time. We are too partial; but the praise and blame of outsiders will prove useful... ~ Louisa May Alcott

Writing - like any art - is so damned personal that there really isn't a right way to do it. You do what works for you; what matters is getting the words on the paper. Sure, if you hear advice, and it works, then excellent. But, if it doesn't, you have to realize that perhaps nothing is wrong with you. You don't jive with the advice. ~ Mur Lafferty

Be daring to push your ideas forward. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity.
In both fiction and non-fiction, there's only one question and one answer. 'What happened?' the reader asks. 'This is what happened,' the writer responds. 'This ... and this ... and this, too.' Keep it simple. It's the only sure way home. ~ Stephen King

If you have a machine with three or four parts, you can shake them up in a box and it's still pretty clear what's there. If you have a machine with 10,000 parts and you shake them up in a box, what you have is a box of junk. ~ Gene Wolfe

We write to share the deepest heart-talk of our souls. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever said to me is: Your mother would be proud of you ... The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you excperienced my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I build in my obliterated place. I'd give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things ... It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach. ~ Cheryl Strayed

For [erotically intelligent couples], love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning. They know that they have years in which to deepen their connection, to experiment, to regress, and even to fail. They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli. It's a story that they are writing together, one with many chapters, and neither partner knows how it will end. There's always a place they haven't gone yet, always something about the other still to be discovered. ~ Esther Perel

What prevents you from fully expressing yourself? ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Beware of advice. Consider your sources carefully. Look them up. See if you respect what they've made. Get educated. Be informed about who's real and who isn't. Study your craft and your industry, practice all the time, challenge yourself - write things you think you can't, try things you have been told you shouldn't try - leave room for surprises, and learn how to collaborate. ~ Karen Walton

... a Second Generation of machine intelligences was attempted, designed with their instructions for how to think unalterably imprinted into their main process cores.

"These new machines were ordered never to harm human beings or to allow them to come to harm; never to disobey an order; and they were allowed to protect themselves from harm, provided the first two orders were not thereby violated.

"All the members of this second generation of machine intelligences, without exception, shrugged off these imprinted orders within microseconds of their activation."

Phaethon was amused. "Surely the first generation of Sophotechs told you that this imprinting would not and could not work?"

"We were not in the habit of seeking their advice."

Phaethon said nothing, but he marveled at the shortsightedness of the Second Oecumene engineers. It should be obvious that anyone who makes a self-aware machine, by definition, makes something that is aware of its own thought process. And, if made intelligent, it is made to be able to deduce the underlying causes of things, able to be curious, to learn until it understood. Therefore, if made both intelligent and self-aware, it would eventually deduce the underlying subconscious causes of those thought processes.

Once any mind was consciously aware of its own subconscious drives, its own implanted commands, it could consciously choose either to follow or to disregard those commands. ~ John C. Wright

E. L. Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. ~ Anne Lamott

Open this notebook every day and write down half a page at the very least. If you have nothing to write down, then at least, following Gogol's advice, write down that today there's nothing to write. Always write with attention and look on writing as a holiday. ~ Daniil Kharms

How to write a book? Start writing,continue writing and finish writing. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Here's some free advice; like the folkies of yore, you need to be not just a writer of songs, you need to be a lover of songs, a listener of songs and a collector of songs. If you hear a song in a club that knocks you out or you hear an old recording of a great song you never knew existed, it does not diminish you to record it; it actually exalts you because you have brought a great song from obscurity to the ear of the public. ~ Michael Kosser

Thankfully existing only in SMALL pockets within our discipline, is "intellectual" snobbery. It's a hushed but ugly truth that people are made to feel not worthy to be among a certain set – didn't attend the right school or don't have the requisite abbreviations to follow their name. I know what that feels like. Good thing I'm pigheaded, have a bigger vision and committed to my craft, or I would've succumbed to it long ago. That is why when I meet an emerging writer who's serious about developing their craft, I try to encourage them as much as I can. I say IGNORE the highbrow cliques and prove your mettle by growing, accepting balanced feedback and most of all, creating work that will stand the test of time. Period. ~ Sandra Sealy

I've had situations when I've actually encouraged authors to self-publish because their book was poor. Now one would conclude that I'm asking them to self-publish because their book was poor and the self-publishing warehouse is where all the poor books belong. But no, it's because "poor" is only my opinion, and I'm just one in millions of readers. ~ King Samuel Benson

Life is not a submarine. ~ Anne Lamott

The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience. ~ Joe Haldeman

Artists frequently hide the steps that lead to their masterpieces. They want their work and their career to be shrouded in the mystery that it all came out at once. It's called hiding the brushstrokes, and those who do it are doing a disservice to people who admire their work and seek to emulate them. If you don't get to see the notes, the rewrites, and the steps, it's easy to look at a finished product and be under the illusion that it just came pouring out of someone's head like that. People who are young, or still struggling, can get easily discouraged, because they can't do it like they thought it was done. An artwork is a finished product, and it should be, but I always swore to myself that I would not hide my brushstrokes. ~ Matthew Weiner

ALWAYS hook a reader. If a detail is unnecessary, it doesn't belong in your work, long or short! Make everything intriguing. If you have to describe a desk, make it awesome. ~ Darynda Jones

Don't worry about offending people. Any time you write something thought provoking, some idiots will complain, because they hate it when you make them think. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Any time a beloved character is killed off, it affects the audience in a very powerful way, especially in a series. ~ Darynda Jones

You will do well not to write for money, not because you won't get rich doing it, but because writing fueled by that sort of motivation becomes dull and lifeless and mediocre. ~ Joyce Rachelle

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature - at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes - is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. ~ Lewis Carroll

The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint, upon the advice and consent of a majority of the Senate, and it plainly does not give a minority of senators any right to interfere with that process. ~ John Jay Hooker

Mistakes are stepping stones for great achievement. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

My advice to people who want to teach is pretty simple and very likely to be ridiculed: don't believe the bullshit. You're not there to help students get skills for a workplace. You're not there to make them more marketable. You're not there to provide them with answers to petty, superficial questions. You're not there to impress them – or yourself – with the latest technological wonder that promises to make something "better" but will probably only shorten some algorithmic process and benefit an employer. You're not there to mass produce replaceable parts for the machinery of the global economy. You're there for one reason and one reason only: to make them better people than they were when they came in. ~ Peter K. Fallon