Writing To Someone Quotes

I think being a woman and writing frankly about violence has gotten me some attention, and as someone who wants people to read my books, I can't complain about that attention, but it does puzzle me that this is something reviewers focus on. ~ Karin Slaughter

Get Up is basically the book I wanted to have my first year of sobriety. I wish someone had given me this book a year before I even went to a meeting because I was already miserable. I didn't enjoy drinking anymore, I just couldn't stand the idea of not doing it. I was afraid if I got sober I wouldn't be able to write anymore. That was a really big fear of mine, which turned out not to be true. ~ Bucky Sinister

Donald Trump is writing a different theme, which is it's midnight in America and that things are bad, and they're bleak, and they're gloomy and they're doomy, and the only thing that is going to save you is someone with the authority and power of somebody like me. ~ Mark Shields

For someone who writes as slowly as I do, each installment is a full day's work. Newspaper novels are painful ... Whether I like what I'm writing or not, whether I'm feeling inspired or not, I have to write an installment every day. ~ Junichiro Tanizaki

Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else ~ William S. McFeely

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead. ~ Margaret Atwood

For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all. ~ Tom Stoppard

...as soon as you think of yourself as teaching contemplation to others, you make another mistake. No one teaches contemplation except God, who gives it. The best you can do is write something that will serve as an occasion for someone else to realize what God wants of him. ~ Thomas Merton

If you want your own distinctive voice, you first have to become someone ... ~ John Geddes

Hire great writers If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. ~ Jason Fried

It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

You have to understand that people feel threatened by a writer. It's very curious. He knows something they don't know. He knows how to write, and that's a subtle, disturbing quality he has. Some directors without even knowing it, resent the writer in the same way Bob Hope might resent the fact he ain't funny without twelve guys writing the jokes. The director knows the script he is carrying around on the set every day was written by someone, and that's just not something that all directors easily digest. ~ Ernest Lehman

Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person's going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don't give them one. ~ Amy Hempel

Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?

A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don't limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You'd be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair.

Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You'll never have fun being someone you're not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out.

Also, don't be afraid to fail, and don't be afraid to walk away. Writing isn't for everyone, and that's totally fine. One doesn't need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction. ~ T.E. Grau

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.' ~ Salman Rushdie

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. ~ N.T. Wright

If someone's going to publish a book about addiction, it has to say something new and different. It has to be something we haven't read before. A lot of these books are published because the writing is wonderful. The Frey book has superb writing, and that can be enough to sell a book. ~ Charles Adams

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions
that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride. ~ Edward Albee

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream. ~ Fernando Pessoa

To write, therefore, is the way of someone who uses the word as bait; the word fishes for something that is not a word. When that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be discarded with relief. But here the analogy ends: the non-word upon taking the bait , has assimilated it. Salvation, then, is to read 'absent-minded'. ~ Clarice Lispector

We invented phonetic writing so we could put
our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head - an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is ~ Carl Sagan

Show me a writer, any writer, who hasn't suffered and I'll show you someone who writes in pastels as opposed to primary colors. ~ Rita Mae Brown

I'm always wondering what is the job that gives the writer the most amount of time to write. I still don't know what the answer is as someone who has taught and is now working at a grocery store. ~ Ali Liebegott

Inspiring someone else to follow their dreams is the hope of anyone who has the courage to follow their own. ~ Dawn Garcia

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks. ~ Dorianne Laux

It's hard to be someone that people talk about and write about, you know? They don't know me. ~ Mariah Carey

I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family. ~ Michael Pollan

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin. ~ Natalie Goldberg

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost! ~ Henry James

Someone once told me people write down stories because they would like to forget, and those who read are those who would like to remember. Maybe I'm not ready to forget, and maybe you're not ready to remember. This is what I recall; I'm sorry if it is a little spotty. I suppose it is what I have the strength to forget… ~ John Zelazny

Fiction writing starts off by requiring the towering arrogance that enables one to sit down at the typewriter in the belief that someone somewhere will actually be eager to read the productions of our own private imaginations. But that arrogance must be buffered by the humility that leads us to learn our craft and strive to make our work comprehensible and inviting and accessible to the reader. ~ Lawrence Block

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.

("Introduction") ~ Francis M. Nevins Jr.

when you are in pain __ no one can feel this better than you .this is not a shame to be in emotional pain.you love someone or hate __ not in your hand . a part of life to going through pain. pain may cause silent killer of your health .
what you must do _ focus on your pain .realizing helps . then you would feel at a point _you have to get out of it. then the moment you focus what can destruct your emotional pain .music ,screaming ,going out,writing, anything ,you may pick up.
one last thing __ never lie to self. shoot direct question and answer to self . create hobbies .
then focus on yourself. look how brilliant you are . how unique you are . then admit ,no power can hurt you so much that has nothing to do with your well being . now _ reject . start to reject . once you understand your pain, the cause , how to keep self safety , ___you are powerful to reject pain slowly . ~ Litymunshi

You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspire someone else. This is what an artist does. ~ Mitch Albom

Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you're writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, 'Your time is up.' ~ Colm Toibin

... it's impossible to write the whole, true story of anything. We always leave things out. We quite often put things in. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try not to, we change things. We tell the story in our own way, which might not be the same way someone else would tell it. ~ Michael Rosen

Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words - if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night - do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match? ~ C.J. Cherryh

She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed like a boy. She had a girl's toughness. She has a boy's gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. She turned boys' heads like a girl. She turned girls' heads like a boy. She made love like a boy. She made love like a girl. She was so boyish it was girlish, so girlish it was boyish, she made me want to rove the world writing our names on every tree. I had simply never found someone so right. Sometimes this shocked me so much that I was unable to speak. ~ Ali Smith

The secret to writing is writing. Lots of people I know talk about writing. They will tell me about the book they are going to write, or are thinking about writing, or may write some day in the future. And I know they will never do it. If someone is serious about writing, then they will sit down every day and put some words down on paper. ~ Michael Scott

I just feel like it's easier to co-write sometimes, especially if you have chemistry with somebody. It kind of takes all the pressure off of you. But, you know, I started writing songs by myself. I didn't really have a co-writer, besides my dad. When I see a record and it has a song on it that someone wrote [alone], I just really believe in them as a writer. I feel like it's a window into them, more than it is if you write a song with someone else. ~ Miranda Lambert

Do you have a piece of paper I could write on?"

I jump up too fast. "Sure. Just one? Do you - of course you need something to write with. Sorry. Here." I grab him a paper from my deskdrawer and one of my myriad pencils, and he uses the first Children of Hypnos book as a flat surface to write on. When I'm sure he's writing something for me to read right now, I say, "I thought you only needed to do that when other people were around?"

He etches one careful line after the next. He frowns, shakes his head. "Sometimes it's . . . tough to say things. Certain things." His voice is hardly a whisper. I sit down beside him again, but his big hand blocks my view of the words. He stops writing, leaves the paper there, and stares.

Then he hands it to me and looks the other direction.

Can I kiss you?

"Um," is a delightfully complex word. "Um" means "I want to say something but don't know what it is," and also "You have caught me off guard," and also "Am I dreaming right now? Someone please slap me."

I say "um," then. Wallace's entire head-neck region is already flushed with color, but the "um" darkens it a few shades, and goddammit, he was nervous about asking me and I made it worse. What good is "um" when I should say "YES PLEASE NOW"? Except there's no way I'm going to say "YES PLEASE NOW" because I feel like my body is one big wired time bomb of organs and if Wallace so much as brushes my hand, I'm going to jump out of my ~ Francesca Zappia

Writing a screenplay, I'm like, "All I'm responsible for is that final script, and I take great effort and pride in that." But once I give it to someone to make, I can disassociate with it entirely and not worry that my vision isn't being represented, because I understand fully that that's not how it works. ~ Daniel Clowes

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily. ~ Karl Kraus

How do you even know I'm someone you'll want to remember? We've only seen each other once before.'
(Amber)
'Have you ever looked at a painting and known you had something in common with it? Have you ever seen something so beautiful you feel like crying? When I see you, I feel that way. I feel like the deepest part of me understands something vital about you.'
(Virgil Daly) ~ Christina Westover

It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest. ~ Barry Mann

Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening. And now along comes someone with a one or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense - that was a happy reform. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down. ~ Diane Setterfield

Tax day was yesterday. And marijuana growers are complaining that they can't write off a single expense thanks to federal laws. Well, apparently someone tried to claim the Phish tour as his home office and that's not going to happen. ~ Conan O'Brien

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity!
People like Mr Bubentsov do not understand anything about art and are not very interested in it, but whenever they happen to come across talentless mediocrities they are pitiless and implacable, They are ready to forgive anyone, but not Makar, that eccentric loser with manuscripts lying in his trunk. The gardener damaged the old rubber plant, and ruined lots of expensive plants, and the general does nothing and goes on spending money like water; Mr Bubentsov only got down to work once a month when he was a magistrate, then stammered, muddled up the laws, and spoke a lot of rubbish, but all this is forgiven and not noticed; but there is no way that anyone can pass by the talentless Makar, who writes passable poetry and stories, without saying something offensive. No one cares that the general's sister-in-law slaps the maids' cheeks, and swears like a trooper when she is playing cards, that the priest's wife never pays up when she loses, and the landowner Flyugin stole a a dog from the landower Sivobrazov, but the fact that Our Province returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka.
If someone does not write the way required, they never ~ Anton Chekhov

Cameron Crowe is someone who I've admired for so long, and I've been friends with him for many years, and I've wanted to work with him so badly that I just never stopped bothering him about writing a script that would be for a pilot. ~ J.J. Abrams

I write about how I was attracted to stripping because I didn't feel comfortable with my body, for instance, but there could be plenty of not-so-good reasons why I chose to go into journalism, too. Maybe someone had a trauma in childhood and it led them to become a nurse, or a lawyer, but because people stigmatize sex work they try to find a traumatic moment in your past and say, "There!" ~ Craig Seymour

With acting, you gotta wait until someone gives you a role in a play or movie. With writing, you're not dependent on others, you don't have to wait. You can sit down and just create. ~ Donal Logue

My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table. I think that's a mistake, in obvious opposition to the ideal of teaching which permits a student to be someone other than the teacher ... The successful teacher has to make each of the students a different product rather than the same. ~ Nicholas Delbanco

I need to write in a small room - the smaller the better. I can't write in a big room where someone might sneak up behind my back. ~ Douglas Preston

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. ~ Stephen King

It was during this period of work that Varda began to conceive a more theoretical approach to her art. She says, "[My work] deals with this question, 'What is cinema?' through how I found specific cinematic ways of telling what I was telling. I could have told you the same things that are in the film by just talking to you for six hours. But instead I found shapes" (Warwick). To give a name to her very particular and personal search for a cinematic language, Varda coined the term cinécriture. As she explains to Jean Decock: "When you write a musical score, someone else can play it, it's a sign. When an architect draws up a detailed floor plan, anyone can build his house. But for me, there's no way I could write a scenario that someone else could shoot, since the scenario doesn't represent the writing of the film." Later she would clarify, "The cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc. In writing its called style. In the cinema, style is cinécriture." (Varda par Agnès [1994], 14). ~ T. Jefferson Kline

There are many expressions to describe someone who is going about something in the wrong way. "Making a mistake" is one way to describe this situation. "Screwing up" is another, although it is a bit rude, and "Attempting to rescue Lemony Snicket by writing letters to a congressman, instead of digging an escape tunnel" is a third way, although it is a bit too specific. ~ Lemony Snicket

To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

A lot of novelists start late - Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter. ~ James M. Cain

When we were doing interviews for our bio, I described hearing that song for the first time to be like Sara was standing on my chest. I just felt really sad, and that was having heard all the other songs in order leading up to that one. I know that when Sara was writing these songs it was during the end of her relationship and it was someone she'd been friends with for almost ten years and been with for four years. It was just the psyche of it, when you've known someone for half your life, literally, and then have to leave them, and not necessarily because you want to but just because it's the right thing to do, and it's just not healthy and you're not good anymore, there's no growth and you have to have growth. And when I hear that song, the idea of that all happening just makes me sick to my stomach a little bit. But it's in an enjoyable way. ~ Tegan Quin

There is nothing more nerve-racking than waiting as someone reads your writing. The reader becomes the videographer, zooming far, far into your heart and soul, unveiling every inch and corner. The writer remains a wary observer at the mercy of the reader, clueless as to how he might react. The writer is exposed, laid bare; her innermost thoughts and feelings are revealed in a potentially scathing moment of vulnerability. I trusted Peter so fully ... in a way that I could not explain. For that very reason, it mattered so immensely. To actually tell him what I knew he had already often seen in my eyes was to allow him to enter a new dimension in that world. And it mattered. It really, truly mattered. ~ Gina Marinello-Sweeney

You can't predict the number of years it will take for someone to find themselves, to mature into their own voice. When I got to be 30, I was finally writing like Danny Brown. ~ Danny Brown

It's entirely possible to get to know someone without actually seeing them in person. In fact, it's better like that because none of the superficial stuff gets in the way. You really get to know a person. And it's easier to express yourself when you're writing things down. At least it is for me. I like to order my thoughts, and delete them if they don't make any sense. You can't do that in real life. ~ Cat Clarke

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something ... or something. ~ Shannon Celebi

It is a little out of touch to presume that someone wants to follow your every observation and insight over the course of hundreds of pages without any sort of payoff. That's why writing isn't a one-way street. You have to give something back: an interesting plot, a surprise, a laugh, a moment of tenderness, a mystery for the reader to piece together. ~ Christopher Bollen

I think if I could ever write with someone, I'd love to write a song with Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton. ~ Jamie Lynn Spears

There's no subject you don't have permission to write about. Students often avoid subjects close to their heart ... because they assume that their teachers will regard those topics as 'stupid.' No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers. ~ William Zinsser

I Need a Good Book

I need a good story.
I need a good book.
The kind that explodes
Off the shelf.
I need some good writing,
Alive and exciting,
To contemplate all by myself.

I need a good novel,
I need a good read.
I probably need
Two or three.
I need a good tale
Of love and betrayal
Or perhaps an adventure at sea.

I need a good saga.
I need a good yarn.
A momentous and mightily
Or slight one.
But with thousands and thousands
And thousands of books,
I need someone to tell me
The right one.

-John Lithgow ~ John Lithgow

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died' - if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator. ~ Amy Bloom

You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply can't see eye to eye. We've nothing whatever in common. Don't you see. . . it's not an accident that's drawn me from Blake to Whitehead, it's a certain line of thought which is fundamental to my whole approach. You see, there's something about them both. . . They trusted the universe. You say I don't know what the modern world's like, but that's obviously untrue. Anyone who's spent a week in London knows just what it's like. . . if you mean neurosis and boredom and the rest of it. And I do read a modern novel occasionally, in spite of what you say. I've read Joyce and Sartre and Beckett and the rest, and every atom in me rejects what they say. They strike me as liars and fools. I don't think they're dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated."

Lewis had lit his pipe. He did it as if Reade were speaking to someone else. Now he said, smiling faintly, "I don't think we're discussing modern literature."

Reade had an impulse to call the debater's trick, but he repressed it. Instead he said quietly, "We're discussing modern life, and you brought up the subject. And I'm trying to explain why I don't think that murders and wars prove your point. I'm writing about Whitehead because his fundamental intuition of the universe is the same as my own. I believe like Whitehead that the universe is a single organism that so ~ Colin Wilson

I've published many biographies over the years and enjoyed working with writers on their research, discussing it, thinking about it and how it revealed their subject - and one day the impulse came to me to write a life of someone. I made a long list of possible subjects and [ Barbara] Stanwyck was on the list. ~ Victoria Wilson

I don't feel that I have to control every aspect of things that I appear in. You learn a lot performing someone else's writing. ~ Steve Carell

Some people think I am an issue-oriented writer, but I've never said to myself, I'm gong to write about such-and-such an issue - that would make for incredibly boring writing, at least to my taste. Creating someone I don't know and her made-up world shows us more about who we are - is actually a better mirror - than if I were to parade in front of you an instantly recognizable person in an instantly recognizable situation. I'm not saying, Let's make it all abstract and weird and difficult and thereby you will know more about yourself. My process is much more organic than that. ~ Suzan-Lori Parks

In Catcher in the Rye, the protagonist Holden Caulfield mentions reading books that make him wish he could be friends with the author and be able to call him on the phone and so forth. I would consider a literary work that made someone feel this way a success. Furthermore, it's the only kind of success in literature that means anything to me. ~ Thomas Ligotti

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

we as authors have been writing about people we aren't for forever. We find a way to empathise, we find a way in. Female characters are no different. All they are are characters. They are people too. Instead of asking yourself, "How do I write this female soldier?" ask yourself, "How do I write this soldier? Where is she from, how was she raised, does she have a sense of humour? Is she big and tall, is she short and petite? How does her size affect her ability to fight? What is her favourite weapon, her least favourite? Why? Is she more logical than emotional? The other way around? Was she an only child and spoiled, was she the eldest of six siblings and a surrogate mother? How does that upbringing affect how she interacts with her team? etc etc and so forth." Notice how the first question gets you some kind of broad, generalised answer, likely resulting in a stereotype, and how the second version asks lots and lots of smaller questions with the goal of creating someone well rounded.

One would hope, really, that we as authors ask such detailed questions of all our characters, regardless of gender.


So let me, at long last, actually answer the original question:

"How do I write a female character?"

Write her the way you would write any other character. Give her dimension, give her strength but please also don't forget to give her weaknesses (for a totally strong nothing can beat her kind of girl is not a person, she's again a ty ~ Adrienne Kress

Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face? ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Each of us is comprised of stories, stories not only about ourselves but stories about ancestors we never knew and people we've never met. We have stories we love to tell and stories we have never told anyone. The extent to which others know us is determined by the stories we choose to share. We extend a deep trust to someone when we say, "I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone." Sharing stories creates trust because through stories we come to a recognition of how much we have in common. ~ Julius Lester

[Professor Kinnerton] Has the fact that we have about 97 percent of our DNA in common with chimpanzees escaped you? How can you still argue we are special and have a soul when we are so obviously animals? ... [Al Gleeson] With due respect sir, the 97 percent is precisely the problem. Are chimpanzees 97 percent of the way to splitting the atom? Are they 97 percent of the way to writing their first sonnet? Someone tittered at the back of the room. Are bonobos 97 percent of the way to putting the first bonobo on the moon? Is there an orangutan somewhere with a simian Mona Lisa 97 percent finished? ~ Peter Kazmaier

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me apologetically "I don't read fiction," I wouldn't have to write fiction anymore. And I share that fascination with the truth. I'm not looking down my nose at it. ~ Ron Currie Jr.

One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and ... type out a beautiful and moving paragraph ... and see those sentences rising up ... and ... think, 'Someday maybe I can write like that ... ' It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for the sentence ... to ... arouse the same feeling. The someone writing whose words were rising from the typewriter became like a mentor for me ... You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own work. ~ Gina Berriault

Imagination is the parallel universe of a writer. If he is not responding to you in this world, he is probably responding to someone in the imaginary world. ~ Heenashree Khandelwal

The best time to tell your story is when you have to tell your story. When it's not really a choice. But then, when you get that first, messy, complicated version down, you have to read it over and be very tough on yourself and ask, 'Well what's the story here?' If you're lucky enough to have someone you trust looking over your shoulder, he or she can help you if [you] lack perspective on your own story. ~ Jeannette Walls

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someone- because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin ... but who we are internally ... perhaps even spiritually. There's something, which impels us to show our inner-souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know. ~ Maya Angelou

I get letters from classes all the time. Say it's assigned in someone's 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it's incredibly gratifying to hear. ~ Michael Pollan

A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite ~ William Goldman

My mother's most common childhood memory of me is standing next to me trying to be heard over the voice on the page. I didn't really commit to writing until I understood that it meant making that happen for someone else. ~ Alexander Chee

Well, friends, learning about the "world" is not pretending you're a hooker while a guy from the part of New Jersey that's near Pennsylvania decides which Steely Dan record to put on at 4:00 A.M. The secrets of life aren't being revealed when someone laughs at you for having studied creative writing. There is no enlightenment to be gained from letting your semiboyfriend's bald friend touch your thigh too close to the place where it meets your crotch, but you let it happen because you think you might be in love. ~ Lena Dunham

You struggle because you're locating all of the magic in your life outside of yourself. When you are loved, then you are lovable. When you are left behind, you are unlovable. When you "arrive" at some point of success and fame as a writer, you will be worthy. Until then, you are worthless.

As long as you imagine that the outside world will one day deliver to you the external rewards you need to feel happy, you will always perceive your survival as exhausting and perceive your life as a long slog to nowhere. Instead, you have to savor the tiny struggles of the day: The cold glass of water after a long run. The hot bath after hours of digging through the dirt. The satisfaction of writing a good sentence, a good paragraph. You MUST feel these things, because these aren't small rewards on the path to some big reward; these tiny things are everything. Savoring these things requires tuning in to your feelings, and it requires loving yourself instead of shoving your nose into your own question marks hour after hour, day after day.

You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, ho ~ Heather Havrilesky

I remembered attending one of Dr. Kerry's lectures, which he had begun by writing, "Who writes history?" on the blackboard. I remembered how strange the question had seemed to me then. My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King's college, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought. I do. ~ Tara Westover

What did you do in your songs?
I don't know, I'll never know, you say. Someone else will write them about me, won't they?
I looked into a void of love. And I fell down. There was nothing else there. No where, where I was no one.
But I have to sing this song. I'm still here. ~ Alice Notley

Now let's say you've finished your first draft. Congratulations! Good job! Have a glass of champagne, send out for pizza, do whatever it is you do when you've got something to celebrate. If you have someone who has been impatiently waiting to read your novel-a spouse, let's say, someone who has perhaps been working nine to five and helping to pay the bills while you chase your dream-then this is the time to give up the goods ... if, that is, your first reader or readers will promise not to talk to you about the book until you are ready to talk to them about it. ~ Stephen King

My dream role is to portray someone like James Baldwin. I've always been a fan of his writing, and I feel like he's one of our unsung heroes. He's been pretty much forgotten, and I think he needs to be recognized. He had to go all the way to Europe to find recognition and acceptance, and I'd just like to bring him to the forefront. ~ Michael K. Williams

Collaboration is just about finding people who are better than you at certain things and combining your powers. Like, if I'm not the strongest at playing piano, I'll work with someone who's really good at it and we'll combine both our brains to write a song. ~ Charlyne Yi

It's a really, really scary thing to stand here, to put words in people's mouths to say to God. It's terrifying to me. You potentially could mess someone up for...I don't know, eternity. ~ David Crowder

But I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else's snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It's world-creating.

It's raw, exposed dreaming. It's humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next.

It's what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience. ~ Laurie Perez

My philosophy on writing a song for myself is that I always, always, always want to write a song. I always want to write a song. I realize that as a record producer or a singer or whatever I might not, if I recorded on myself or someone else, the first time out I might not give it the right treatment, so that the world or many people will accept it and it'll be a public hit, or anything like that. ~ Smokey Robinson