Writing Rules Quotes

I don't understand these rules. Writing rules. Eating rules. Studying rules. Loving rules. Everything in life seems to be governed by rules. Is that the only way to keep a person grounded? Does it really instil self-restraint or is it just a fear tactic that's used so that no one can fly to the highest realms of glory? ~ Aditi Bose

1. Write like you'll live forever - fear is a bad editor.
2. Write like you'll croak today - death is the best editor.
3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.
4. Pick one - fame or delight.
5. The archer knows the target. The poet knows the wastebasket.
6. Cunning and excess are your friends.
7. TV and liquor are your enemies.
8. Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3 a.m.
9. You're done when the crows sing. ~ Ron Dakron

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

You need to realize that most writing rules aren't laws, they're rules of thumb. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Writing Tip:
Don't let the "writing rules" bog you down when you're writing the first draft; they don't matter when you're writing the story, only when you're editing the story. ~ Linda Westphal

Writing rules is not one of the more 'glamorous' aspects of working on games. It is a task that is, in general, more drudgery than glory. ~ Jim Dunnigan

Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write. ~ Amy Tan

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don't usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I'm saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place. ~ Lydia Davis

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form. ~ Clint Eastwood

People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job. ~ Paul Theroux

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

Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self? ~ T.C. Boyle

Revision plays a very large role in writing. Sometimes it seems to be all revision. And the longer I write, the more I revise-until it is completely right. ~ Ellen Hunnicutt

Create diverse characters because you can. Especially ones that aren't easy to write. A character that scares you is worth exploring. Yet if you breathe life into a character and it comes to you too easily - say you're writing from the viewpoint of a black man in America and you're not one? Think hard about where your inspiration is coming from. ~ Mary H.K. Choi

Legalism insists on conformity to manmade religious rules and requirements, which are often unspoken but are nevertheless very real ... There are far too many instances within Christendom where our traditions and rules are, in practice, more important than God's commands. ~ Jerry Bridges

It is perhaps because of the Iranian concept of the home and garden (and not the city or town it is in) as the defining center of life that Iranians find living in a society with such stringent rules of public behavior somewhat tolerable. Iranian society by and large cares very little about what goes on in the homes and gardens of private citizens, but the Islamic government cares very much how its citizens behave once they venture outside their walls. ~ Hooman Majd

The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me. ~ David B. Coe

A man would have to be an idiot to write a book of laws for an apple tree telling it to bear apples and not thorns, seeing that the apple-tree will do it naturally and far better than any laws or teaching can prescribe. ~ Martin Luther

By writing , people present their lives as fiction and tackle their issues as a craft exercise . By redeeming their protagonist , they find their own redemption . ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Under bright scarlet hair, teachers' favorite pigmentation of ink, the awful cast splashed and dripped down his face, a grisly reminder of mistakes bruising that had bruised. ~ Jazz Feylynn

All we are doing are self-portraits. As simple that. We accumulate knowledge and wisdom and power, and we get our hearts broken, and we write. We write for others to absorb what took us so long to understand. ~ Cristian Mihai

I think people who write programs do have at least a glimmer of extra insight into the nature of God ... because creating a program often means that you have to create a small universe ~ Donald Knuth

To sit down so often with nothing to say,-to say something so often, almost without consciousness of saying and without any remembrance or having said,-is a power of which I will not violate my modesty by boasting; but I do not believe everyone has it. ~ Michael Kelahan

There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision. ~ Virginia Woolf

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. ~ Paul Dirac

Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way. ~ Lou Reed

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I didn't leave that crowd of ocelots to go back into it." [when asked to write the film script for The Osterman Weekend] ~ Robert Ludlum

But a writing project begins not just in doubt but also in faith-that if your passion is genuine, if you have mastered the elements of your craft, in the act of writing you will learn the rest of what you need to know in order to do justice to your subject. ~ Philip Gerard

There were still few rules at Down House, and Charles was not very good at enforcing the ones he and Emma did make. This was well known among his children. In 1855, when Lenny was about five, Charles walked in to find his son jumping up and down and tumbling all over a new sofa.
'Oh Lenny, Lenny,' Charles said. 'You know it is against all rules.'
'Then,' Lenny said to his papa, 'I think you'd better go out of the room.'
And so Charles did. ~ Deborah Heiligman

Business is a game like baseball or golf or anything else. I enjoy being a student of the game, and reading, and learning, and going to conferences, whether it's building custom homes or selling or servicing medical equipment. A good entrepreneur can be a good entrepreneur in any industry because if you're a good student of the game, the rules and the lessons are very much the same. And that's the fun part about it. ~ Ryan Diest

Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken, outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society ... We look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age. ~ Don Marquis

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that. ~ Steve Earle

My dream project is a sports film, because I love writing emotional music and a sports film is one of the few places you can do it without being melodramatic. ~ Jeff Cardoni

When crises come, though friends and relatives may be generous and eager to help, in the end it is I, alone on the trail, alone in the museum, alone in the courtroom, alone in the emergency room, alone in the morgue, alone in my illness, alone in my reading, alone in my writing, alone in the silence of my heart. ~ Fenton Johnson

Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline. ~ Peter Benchley

The 1980s: feminism, postmodernism, sexual/textual politics

While it might be tempting to generalise that Woolf 's writing was being discussed almost in two separate camps during the 1980s, formalists on the one hand, and feminists on the other, this would be to simplify things too far.
Many critics were attempting to make sense of and connect her feminist politics with her modernist practices. Such investigations coincided with the explosion of theory in literary studies, and once again the work of Virginia
Woolf was central to the framing of many of the major theoretical developments in literary critical engagements with feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In the context of the rise of 'high theory'
and the questioning of old-school Marxist, materialist, humanist and historicist literary theories, Woolf studies wrestled with the locating of her radical feminist politics in the avant-garde qualities of the text itself, and its endlessly transgressive play of signifiers, with the Woolfian inscription of radically deconstructed models of the self and of sexuality and jouissance. ~ Jane Goldman

I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all. ~ Wallace Shawn