I hope you have a book telling others how you do what you do. If you answered no, then I challenge you to spend the next couple of hours reading this book and then, in the next ten days implementing what you’ve learned here. When you realize the va...
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...
Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer the person who could write it.
I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythm...
What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some...
I don’t bother with rhyme. Rarely Are two trees the same, one beside the other. I think and write like flowers have color But with less perfection in my way of expressing myself Because I lack the divine simplicity Of wholly being only my exterior....
I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible but I was also exhausted by the effort. I clearly wasn't in shape. You don...
This book has nothing to do with cats. Or mice. Or self-motivation. This book is 100% 50% finished. But don’t worry, I finished the good half. But don’t be mistaken—the good half isn’t good at all. In fact, it’s remarkably terrible. It’s ...
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not...
I make time to write.
I like to write poetry.
...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.
It's so much easier to write for a person in your life than to write for some imagined readership, so you write something that's more intimate and true.
If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.
You should constantly write because your writing is always evolving and progressing. It's really important to start writing young.
My son had toyed with the idea of writing and trying to write a little bit, so that kind of gave me the bug to write also.
You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.
The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.
Write at a pace that doesn't surpass your creative flow. Don't be hasty; don't be sloppy. Don't forfeit impressive writing for an impressive word count. Because eventually it will all have to be edited, and you'll find that it is harder to make bad w...
All writers start out writing badly, but with diligence and determination, we all get better. It's then that writing becomes truly fun and always engaging. When you no longer have to worry about how you write, you can start thinking about what to wri...
