Writing Coach Quotes

If you have a story inside you but don't know where to start, look within and write from the heart, for the heart will never steer you wrong. ~ Shanda Trofe

One tends to write beyond what's needed. ~ James Schuyler

Because word counts don't matter when the words written down are mediocre. And 50,000 that you've forced yourself to write are 50,000 that somebody will feel forced to read. ~ Anonymous

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld advised aspiring comedian Brad Isaac that, because daily writing was the key to writing better jokes, Isaac should buy a calendar with a box for every day of the year, and every day, after writing, cross off the day with a big red X. "After a few days you'll have a chain," Seinfeld explained. "You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain. ~ Gretchen Rubin

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad. ~ Justin Cronin

He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page. ~ Robert Cormier

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story. ~ Frank Yerby

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure
in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically. ~ Marge Piercy

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work. ~ Don DeLillo

Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more. ~ A. E. Hotchner

If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff ... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east. ~ Robert Benchley

Why did you bother coming here at all?"

"For my work. That's my profession. Writing about important things that are happening in the world."

"I'm curious to know what exactly you wrote about Gulu. What important thing has been happening here in our town?"

"Do you think what I do is of no significance?"

She gestured impatiently. "Others have come here too, asked the children questions and then gone away, and at least it was all cut-and-dried. But you came back. I thought it was going to be different. What did you come back for? ... You barged into our lives, and now you've got cold feet. What are you afraid of? You got too close to us, right? ~ Jagielski Wojciech

A good coach is postive. Your job when coaching is not correcting mistakes, finding fault, and assessing blame. Instead, your function is achieving goals by coaching your staff to peak performance. Focusing on the positive means that you start with what's good and what works, and spend your attention and energy there. ~ Marshall Cook

I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection. ~ John Darnielle

Rejection. Rejection. You can't handle rejection! ~ Buffy Andrews

Let's not talk about it any more, but if you still want anything please write to me about it, because I can say what I mean much better on paper. ~ Anne Frank

My dad is my hitting coach. When I need help, I go to him. ~ Robinson Cano

I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I have completed and uncompleted screenplays, but they both fall into the category of "unsold." I've seen quite a few movies where the screenplays seemed to be in the "uncompleted" category yet still got sold and made into movies, so I generally refer too all screenplays as "sold" or "unsold." But that's just my own filing system. ~ Gary Reilly

The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were never truly alone. ~ Hal Zina Bennett

I think it's good to have a balance. Everything I write about, it's not something I necessarily might have went through, there's songs where I might have an idea, sometimes it might be a melody or something that I like, I make up a story to go with that melody. But I do think it's most important to have honest songs. ~ Leon Bridges

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

In certain areas I don't function well and in other areas I function very well. I'm very good professionally. I have good discipline, I'm able to write every day and do films and not go six times over the budget. I mean I'm a coherent person, but I also don't like to go through tunnels when I travel. I'm claustrophobic. ~ Woody Allen

It's good when someone says, "Would you write a song for this purpose," or "would you record a song for this purpose," or "would you help me realize this song," again, for this purpose. ~ Will Oldham

All the technologies mentioned and described in this book either existed at the time of its writing or were being developed in a clandestine way. ~ Pulkit Ahuja

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving. ~ Billie Sue Mosiman

When I was at school I got lines for dropping a big squelchy, loud fart. My teacher, who was a priest, made me write 'I must not fart in class' 100 times. I left that school shortly afterwards. ~ Brian McFadden

Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas. ~ Steven Pinker

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer ... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you've turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying
trying as hard as you can
which is a good thing. ~ Robin McKinley

Is princess here?" Coach called from his office.
"The she-wolf has arrived!" Evan yelled back.
Coach emerged from his office and stood in front of us.
Oh God, he had the short shorts on again. ~ Micalea Smeltzer

You always have to write script with a budget in mind. Although it's always good to write the big story, you really have to think about how things are going to work as far as cast, effects and settings. It's a process. You have to always think budget and then execute and make it happen. ~ Harrison Smith

Some people, like Leonard Cohen, write one album every 10 years, and labor over a song for five years at a time. ~ PJ Harvey

It ticks me no end when people get ticked off at those of us who comment audibly and in print on events and problems. That's what we're paid for. Why clutter up your mind with a bunch of facts that might inhibit the solve-ability of us who must express an opinion? After all, all the world cries out for a solution to its problems, and we supply them right and left. Come to think of it, it's we who should be giving our deplorers and detractors the blast; because 99% of the time they don't do as we say. ~ Malcolm Forbes

It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like the number one, or an 'I', or a shaft of light between almost closed curtains. There is an old letter called a thorn, which jags and tears at the throat as it's uttered. Later he learns that Grammar and Glamour share the same deeper root, which is further magic, and there can be neither magic without that root, nor plant. He's lost in it like Chid in Child, or God reversed into Dog. Somewhere inside him is a colon. A sentence can last for life. ~ Charles Lambert

Remember this, if you have written a couple dozen short stories and sold them to national markets, the chances are you know as much about the business as many of the editors you are trying to sell to. You are going to have to write what they want, but always be sure the paths they want you to take are reasonable. The chances are they know what is salable and they must be listened to. But only you can determine what is distinctly yours and that is your road to the ultimate success. Editors come and go constantly and the next man may love what the last man despised.

It's all taste and opinion and one man is different from the next. Mr. Faulkner might not appreciate Mr. Spillane, but that is also true in reverse.

None of this need concern you. Out there, beyond the lighted limits of the place you sit and type, somebody is waiting for the kind of thing you write. Writing can never be more than communication and should never be less.

So what do you do? You keep typing. ~ William Campbell Gault

You talk to people and they seem really nice and then you read what they write and it's very disillusioning. You have to deal with how people let you down in terms of that. Because I think I'm basically a nice person and I think I'm a real person, and a lot of people aren't. ~ Mariah Carey

But if this biography suggests a varied and sympathetic apprehension of the world, it was with a far darker palette that Céline came to paint his word-pictures when he began writing in the late 1920's. Straightforward fear adumbrates his invective, which - despite the reputation he would later earn as a rabid anti-Semite - is aimed against all classes and races of people with indiscriminate abandon. Indeed, if "Ulysses" is the great modernist novel most inspired by a desire for humanistic inclusion, then "Journey" is its antithesis: a stream of misanthropic consciousness, almost unrelieved by any warmth or fellow-feeling. ~ Will Self

I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on ... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science. ~ Poul Anderson

I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy. ~ Ariel Gore

Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends as next-door neighbors in the late 1920s, when they were about kindergarten age. From the start, they recognized in each other "an apartness," as Capote later expressed it; and both loved reading. When Lee's father gave them an old Underwood typewriter, they began writing original stories together. ~ Charles J. Shields

Writing isn't about the destination-writing is the journey that transforms the soul and gives meaning to all else. ~ Sue Grafton