Writing Advice Quotes - Page 2

Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.

I am sorry, I am not a writer. I simply put my thoughts on paper. Those helped by them call them a book and me a writer. Those who are not helped call it rubbish and me a fool. Both have reason.

Being a writer all boils down to this: It's you, in a chair, staring at a page. And you're either going to stay in that chair until words are written, or you're going to give up and walk away. The great writers have to fight for their words. They have to choose to write, choose words over distractions, and their characters over their friends. Great writers can be lonely, exhausted souls. But through our characters, we live.

Celebrate your day of birthday as special day.Make a specific birthday wishes and write it down.You will be amazed about the power of pen and inner strength to accomplish the wishes.This will be a special gift for yourself on each birthday.

Any time a beloved character is killed off, it affects the audience in a very powerful way, especially in a series.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long words that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb. every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the edit.", The Guardian, 20 February 2010]

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

It's a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not by design. The wise writer writes the best he can and leaves it to posterity to decide about greatness.

Writing is easy. Writing a publishable book is hard.

I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then we are somehow diminished.

Words disappear in the air, but writing remains. If you want something to be remembered about you, write it down

It takes persistent practice to be skilful in the act.

Able writers let us into their minds and show us how they think and by that open our minds to ourselves

Every book has its ancestors

...some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ...

...people quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression...

ALWAYS hook a reader. If a detail is unnecessary, it doesn't belong in your work, long or short! Make everything intriguing. If you have to describe a desk, make it awesome.

Writer's Block: making authors miserable since the Stone Age.

Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.

Hypocrisy is our friend. Power structures have to pretend to hold values in order to win the loyalty of at least some of society. We can use the gap between those professed values and reality to move people to try to change the reality towards the values.

The world would have been a better place if some men had just shut their mouths.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

You need an interesting voice. A grabber opening is great, compelling characters are awesome, but the voice – your unique voice – is what carries your story. Find your voice. Own your voice. Learn to tell interesting stories using your unique voice. That is the key.

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

Whenever I encounter writer’s block, I stop writing … with my hands; and I then start writing with my legs.

I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate.

You take a universal concept, something that has been done a million times (because everything has been done a million times), and add a fresh twist to it. Something no one saw coming. But mostly fresh writing! Keep it clean, simple, and compelling.

If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.

Pound it out, get it done, write every day. No excuses. Kerouac said you can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club. Damn straight. You’ll sleep a lot better getting your word count in than another quick Twitter check or keeping up to date on the Kardashians.

Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.

[Speaking about writing her first novel] You have to be passionate enough about it and I was.

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.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

When you're writing, don't forget to keep your favorite audience in mind--you.

If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

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.

Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "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 is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying.

It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.

Art is a journey of excellence not a goal of perfection.

Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is theresultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go, and theseyou must study, each by itself, if you would create a livingcharacter. 'But,' you will say, 'in order to note these fleetingthoughts one must know them, must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings.You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a two-fold being, setting free the witness-personality so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts.

Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.

...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

If you only had a year left to live, what book would you write?Now, write that book.

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.

Develop the skill of writing to avoid errors but if you do make them, don’t be demotivated

If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.

People say that writers write for money. From my own experience that's not true. I write for me. I publish for money.

Make it so good and so clear that it doesn't need any further explanation.

When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives-and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by the desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don't understand.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

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.

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice.

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

I am grateful to the Lord for blessing my path as a writer.

To master magical realism, one must make the real seem unreal but, more importantly, make the unreal seem real.