Writing Process Quotes - Page 12

Writing is the thing that props me up.

... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...

The only difference between writers and people who don't write is that writers aren't afraid to display their demons.

Working on it.

I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to the words you choose and the order in which you arrange them.

Let your characters lead when you're dancing together.

Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.

Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.

Don’t ever let yourself surrender to writer’s block.

Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.

I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will probably be nonexistant a 100 years later, but - you know - i have no idea what else to do. I like creating. What else can i do?

I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then I rewrite.

Start with a word. A word leads to a sentence, which leads to a paragraph, which leads to a chapter, which leads to a manuscript, which leads to a book..... just start with a word!

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.

Each of us wages a private battle to thrive. Whenever a person fully immerses oneself in life’s aromatic flower garden of pleasures and encounters life’s warship of armor-plated rigors, they blend and bend to make reasonable accommodations for surviving. Scripted and unscripted encounters with superior militant forces bruise us mightily and eventually cut us to the core. Every person’s life contains a minefield of obstacles that function as potential barriers to achieving our ultimate manifestation. The expended labor of continuously hefting oneself over one contentious hurdle after another is what leads a conscientious person onto the path of needing to write in order to create emotional poultices to ameliorate painful wounds.

The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I've somehow got to fill.

Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro, from what could work to what does—but start with the dream. Nothing is real apart from the clouds, and all clouds pass with life in their wake—some rain thoughts.

Never use the passive voice. Do not say, 'It will get done.' Say, 'I'll do it,' and then stick to a solid, unwavering deadline

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?

I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet.

Writing is not a numbers game. You should focus more on reaching the hearts of readers and building fans more than publishing a plethora of books that no one may care about.

I personally believe that one learns to write by writing.

The skill of writing needs much patience, practicing, and time. There is no good writing from a quick effort, or a confused writer.

At it's best,the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then - and only then - it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way.

Life is a rich literature. We are only writing the history of our time.

...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...

People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.

I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you,and that you will work with these stories from your life--not someone else's life--water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.

Nothing listens as well as a blank page.

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.

Laughing in my ear is a muse amused by how I paint her whims on paper with silly words.

You never know what you will write until you write it

Begin at the beginning as you understood it, proceed through the middle, continue to the end, and then stop," said Master Li, and he sauntered out to get drunk....