Writing Craft Quotes

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again. ~ John Gardner

The answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ... ~ John Geddes

Real writers write. Period. No, the muse does not come to visit everyday. She's a lazy, precocious flirt. You cannot get into the habit of being "in the mood" to write. No writer on Earth is in the mood to write everyday, but the good ones do it anyway. They fight through their fatigue, their stress, their doubt, and they write. They get the words on the page. Period.
So stop waiting for your muse. Trust me, she sleeps around. ~ Darynda Jones

Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick - then it's personal. The bad guy isn't just the "bad guy" anymore, he's the BAD GUY! ~ Michael J. Sullivan

Sometimes all you want to do is to keep on writing. ~ Avijeet Das

Don't polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes aren't improvements, they're just changes. ~ Dan Alatorre

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare ~ Erica Jong

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How. ~ James J. Kilpatrick

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! ~ Hilary Mantel

Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun. ~ Heather Grace Stewart

A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating. ~ Bill Johnson

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited ~ Virginia Woolf

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words. ~ Virginia Woolf

Write what is important to you, regardless of fashion or marketability or anything like that – all those things are so far out of your control that you may as well not think about them. Of course, this may mean you'll never be published but that's a risk we all take every single time we set hands to keyboard or pen to paper. For me, if I can sit back at the end of a project and say, 'yes, I stayed honest, I said what I wanted to say, and I made it sing to the best of my ability', then I'm happy enough. Of course, if anyone wants to buy the damned thing off me when I'm done, that's jam I won't refuse. ~ Celine Kiernan

You gotta dig through the shit to get to the gold. ~ Diego Ramos

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words
not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable ~ Jacques Barzun

I tell everyone who asks me about writing ... almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it's that 290 or so pages in between that are tough! ~ Brooklyn Hudson

And these aches in my heart create poetry! ~ Avijeet Das

Sixteen unseeing stone of disheveled male slammed into her; Robin was knocked off her feet and catapulted backwards, handbag flying, arms windmilling, towards the void beyond the lethal staircase. ~ Robert Galbraith

Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it! ~ Avijeet Das

Tighten your prose so the story flows. ~ Anna Dobritt

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right. ~ Amy Joy

God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer. ~ Gerard De Marigny

Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language. ~ Mary Oliver

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers ... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation. ~ Ray Bradbury

The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking. ~ Allan Lokos

In the book (Savvy Stories) you see some very real, very personal moments. The first week of Savvy's life was the longest week of ours. We spent five days in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) worrying that our newborn daughter might die. It was touch and go for a while, and it was extremely difficult to write about. Chapter two gets a lot of people crying. But because we put that honesty out there, readers said "Okay, I can trust this guy." Then they were better able to laugh with us, too. ~ Dan Alatorre

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not. ~ Gore Vidal

A writer feels happy when the words connect with the reader's heart. ~ Avijeet Das

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we've thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it's not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It's not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs. ~ Elena Ferrante

Dig deep and go where the pain and fear and joy are, and put it out there. The minute you shy away from pure honesty in your writing, you become a liar. ~ Dan Alatorre

You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire. ~ Lisa Cron

You can't just come out and say what you have to say. That's what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That's because of the way he's telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story. ~ Adair Lara

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone. ~ Shannon Celebi

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written. ~ Robert Hass

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and ... read.
But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you've become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes. ~ Chila Woychik

This whole show vs tell concept both bewilders and challenges my mind. ~ Davee Jones

No matter how entertaining, diverse, concise, or detailed, a writing craft book is, it's not going to work magic on you, it's not going to suddenly make you a brilliant writer simply by reading it. You need to use what you read and learn in your own writing. Because that's when you have those AHA moments. That's when it really sticks. ~ Jessica Bell

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it. ~ Witold Gombrowicz

And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves. ~ Darynda Jones

If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit. ~ Robert McKee

On Writing: A multitude of improbabilities can be forgiven as long as enough plausibility has been established. ~ Danielle Ackley-McPhail

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament. ~ Vivian Gornick

You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties. ~ Rick Aster

Doubt is the only reliable source of creativity. ~ Peter Tieryas

Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb. ~ Dan Alatorre

Initially I was sad and lonely. I would spend sleepless nights feeling morose, sad, and dejected. I suffered from depression. I would go blank some moments. I would collapse in my room in utter sadness.

Then I fought back at life. I wanted to give life a good fight. I embraced each struggle and each hardship in my life. I started reading and writing with passion. I started writing regularly. And I started sharing my emotions, feelings, thoughts, and stories with others. ~ Avijeet Das

I like to think I've written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters. ~ Carla H. Krueger

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect. ~ George R R Martin

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot. ~ Ray Bradbury

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk. ~ Stanley Fish

At seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ... ~ John Geddes

If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters. ~ George Orwell

What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free. ~ Allison K. Williams

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page. ~ Nora Roberts

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality. ~ Zbigniew Herbert

Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better. ~ Jennifer Hudson Taylor

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM. ~ Tiffany Madison

When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete ... you feel as if you could do anything. ~ Christy Hall

Don't write what you know - what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you - and interests you deeply - and your readers will catch fire at your words. ~ Valerie Sherwood

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer. ~ Margaret Atwood

A clever trick does not a concept make. ~ Larry Brooks

The hard part is putting one word after another. ~ Jo Linsdell

There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet. ~ Aaron Allston

A writer is chosen by the universe to be the architect of the next generation. ~ Avijeet Das

From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet... technology progression yes... style? ~ David H. Millar

Don't be afraid of what you're creating. ~ Christy Hall

Delayed gratification hints that something terrible is going to happen, and then delays the resolution.

It's that interval between the promise of something awful and it actually happening, where suspense resides. ~ Sandy Vaile

Storytellers don't show, they tell. I'm sticking with that. ~ Ashly Lorenzana

If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality. ~ Arthur Plotnik

There's no right way of writing. There's only your way. ~ Milton Lomask

The clouds made their own images. Looking at them I could fill in the pages. ~ Suyasha Subedi

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant. ~ Louis L'Amour

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. ~ Ray Bradbury

...I've never understood the logic that says a work doesn't need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I've also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer. ~ Glen Hirshberg

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it.

Open your soul and they will stop and watch. ~ Dan Alatorre

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened. ~ Annie Dillard

Where do [writers] get [their] ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where the come from and nobody should know. They evolve in thin air, they float down from some mysterious heaven, and we reach and grab one, to grasp in our imagination, and to make it our own. One writer might overhear a conversation in a cafe and a whole novel will be built from that moment. Another might see an article in a newspaper and a plot will suggest itself immediately. Another might hear about an unpleasant incident that happened to a friend of a friend in a supermarket . . . . ~ John Boyne

Most - but not all - of the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn't want to be anyone's employee if it interfered with their writing. They were halfway or all the way outside the mainstream and were often not interested in becoming part of the burgeoning corporate society. They had more freedom than your average American. ~ Sterling Lord

For me, not knowing your theme until your finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe – there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there's a high chance it won't work. ~ David G. Allen

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared ... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read") ~ William S. Wilson

Good writing just isn't that common. ~ Eric Flint

During 30 years of earning my daily bread as a writer I have learned many lessons about our craft. The most significant of those lessons is that I still have many lessons to learn about out craft. ~ H.P. Oliver

Suspense doesn't always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story. ~ Sandy Vaile

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012! ~ Stella Atrium

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well. ~ Margaret Jean Langstaff

Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much? ~ Hannah Harding

The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow! ~ John Gaver

Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two. ~ Shannon Celebi

Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing. ~ Victor LaValle

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo. ~ John Irving

Contrary to popular belief, people always say "It was a pleasure doing business with you". It is the only thing that has stayed with me after an assignment. Always mix business with pleasure. That is a secret they don't want you to know. BUT never mix pleasure with business. Then you might just end up in a divorce. ~ Nikhil Sharda

We're not mad. We're inhabited ~ Sue Moorcroft

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I'm struck by how much they see and how much they know--and how much I don't.

Good art writing should therefore do at least two things. It should teach us how to look: at art, architecture, sculpture, photography and all the other visual components of our daily landscape. And it should give us the information we need to understand what we're looking at. ~ William Zinsser

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire. ~ Gillian Marchenko

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words. ~ C.S. Lewis