Writing Craft Quotes - Page 2

Bye-bye. Nice knowing you. But if you are waiting for that perfect idea to strike like lightning during a dust storm (I live in New Mexico), you could be waiting a long time. Ideas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can’t walk to the bathroom without being hit with another idea. It’s what you DO with that idea that matters. Here is your mantra: BICHOK, BICHOK, BICHOKTranslation: Butt in chair, hands on keys. Just write. Every stinking day.

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

Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. The quality of writing—which is crucial in almost every other form of literature—is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn’t anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don’t want to begin with “Once upon a time,” because the audience gets antsy.

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.

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 read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

Telling a story is like playing a fiddle. No one want's to hear it when it's done badly

Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind. The chances are that you'll never make them identical. That's one reason I'm still hitting the keyboard. Obsessed by the secrets of my past, I try to put metaphorical versions of them on the page, but each time, no matter how honest and hard my effort, what's in my mind hasn't been fully expressed, compelling me to keep trying. To paraphrase a passage from John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," I'll die telling stories to myself in the dark. But there's never enough time. There was never enough time.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

How many great gems were lost to thoughtand not put down to pen.You can but think of just a fewand then they're lost again.

Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore—does that ruin the romance?

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

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.

Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.

My characters still talk the way normal people talk. They argue, they are sarcastic with each other, they joke around. I usually end up with one outrageous minor character in each book that people just rave about. We all have that one friend who says and does things that are a riot. A character like that is the salt in the soup: you want just enough to bring everything to life.

I don’t just want a gripping story line. I shoot for the three dimensional literary Braille to a silent Scorsese movie

But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way. I've seen beginning writers pepper curse words through sentence after sentence.'If you don't -blanking- get your -blanking-blank-blank- in to this house this -blanking- minute, I'm going to -blank- your -blank- and nail it to the -blanking- door.'Two things happen when I read this junk: I get bored and I get angry. I didn't pick up your book to read garbage. If this is as clever as you can be, I don't want to read your prose. In life if you met someone who spoke like this, you'd want to flee. Then why put this stuff on the page?As near as I can determine, this abomination occurs because a writer is corrupted by the awful -blanking- dialog that movies inflict on us these days. It's also a sign of insecurity. The writer wonders if the dialog is strong enough and decides a lot of -blanking-blank- will do the trick.Someone might object that this kind of dialog is realistic in certain situations--intense scenes involving policemen or soldiers for example. I can only reply that in my research I spend considerable time with policemen and soldiers. Few of them curse any more than a normal person would. This garbage isn't realistic. It merely draws attention to itself and holds back the story. Use it sparingly.

Good fiction makes the truth believable.

My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess.

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

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.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

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

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

A writer can do without food for a few hours, but not without the sight of books.

I should be writing ...

What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) ... it's that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader's heart.

To my mind, the most important thing in any form of fiction is the human element, but only if it takes us beyond the everyday, into situations that examine the complexities that may fascinate or puzzle us. To dwell on the mundane as some kind of a writing exeercise is useless.

When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.

Writing's in the nouns.

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.

As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit out of your reader.

Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.

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.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.

No writing is effortless. I’m not saying you can’t have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I’m not saying a character hasn’t somehow gone in a different direction that I wanted her to go, but that was me, not her. I let her get away from me. I let her roam free and nine times out of ten, the result is not good. I have to go back and start over because she veered off the path of my book. She changed the vision. And I did that. Not her.

I don't imagine book elitists as my audience when writing. I dream about teachers, morticians and garbage men instead.

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. "This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends." He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. "In my mind, they were a whole lot better."Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind.

Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page?Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.Play with syntax.Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will.Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time).Maximum sentence length: seventeen words.Minimum: One.Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.

You are not an "author," you are a writer. If your books are still selling like hotcakes ten years after your demise, THEN you're an author.

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.

When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.

A writer creates from his mind; his creations emanate from the feelings enmeshed deep within his heart. From the fire burning within his soul, he gives shape to his thoughts. His thoughts start to breathe. Every sentence breathes with a purpose.

Inspiration can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be quite fickle ... If you want to be able to call on inspiration reliably then you need to work on it with regularity. Someone once said that if you only go out with a bucket to collect water when it's raining, sometimes you'll get water. But if you go out with your bucket every day, even when it's not raining, sometimes you'll catch unexpected rain. And also, a strange thing may happen: that the very act of going out with your bucket may actually provoke such rain.

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.

The pen is mightier than the sword as long as it doesn't run out of ink.

Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.

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

The paradox of writing is that you’re trying to use words to express what words can’t express.

Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.