Writing Process Quotes - Page 8

Life's a book filled on pages Just awaiting to be written.Some don't open it for ages,Maybe afraid of being bitten.

All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten feet away, the smell of dust falling onto the hot bulb in the lamp. That's the miracle of writing, the place you try to find--when the room, your body, and even time itself cooperate in a vanishing act.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like -- what’s going on -- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness]

The time to being writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.

A book can be a great friend, an advisor, a means to an end. A book reveals so much more than a movie would ever do. For example, when I watched the movie “The Hours” I was fascinated by the story. Just a year later I decided to read the book. And what was my surprise that I was even more dazzled by its writings than I was by the images… The images in my head were more vivid than the film could ever transport me to that feminine universe that the author was trying (and so successfully granted me) to conceive…

For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.

Writing is easy. Saying something that would make a difference is the task.

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.

My dear Keats go on, don't despair, collect incidents, study characters, read Shakespeare and trust in Providence.

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

We write to embrace the sacred thoughts.

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life’s legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack.

10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.

To air one's views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which, in any event, may not be relevant to the discussion.

Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.

Don't think about the writing process too much. Just do one thing: tell the motherfucking story.

I write the sacred words from wondering.

An author’s operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature.

WARNING: The production of spirit is a very delicate and dangerous procedure. It should be left to the professionals and under absolutely no circumstance be replicated.

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.

It’s easy to write a sentence, paragraph, or book. What’s difficult is writing the best sentence, paragraph, or book, you can write.

You don't teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.

There's nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself." Professor Piper

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

There are three difficulties in authorship: – to write anything worth publishing - to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it. — Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]

Getting started on writing a book isn't as hard as it sounds. You don't need a plan and an outline. In fact, all you need are two things: time and one idea.

It's better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.

Inspiration do not come and cannot be found, it has to exist - somewhere, somehow. Do believe that what you are doing is the most important thing in this world, and do believe that your words can be magical. Because I know they can be and I know they are. If you feel that you are lost in your own mind, don’t think, just write. Sometimes we have to erase our thoughts and memories to gain enough strength to be able to write down our inner thoughts. If you don’t know what it is, if you think it’s ridiculous or silly, you’re definitely on the right way. Sometimes you will hate your words and sometimes you will love them. This is the fun part of greatness in which the other part definitely will be your devil. Remember; with greatness comes obstacles.

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan.

I had found by experience that putting things down on paper helped to clear the mind in precisely the same way, as Mrs. Mullet had taught me, that an eggshell clarifies the consommé or the coffee, which, of course, is a simple matter of chemistry. The albumin contained in the eggshell has the property of collecting and binding the rubbish that floats in the dark liquid, which can then be removed and discarded in a single reeking clot: a perfect description of the writing process.

You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

I wish my brain had an off switch. Maybe that way I could get some sleep.

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.

To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

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

I miss the days when I was alone with my characters and no one else knew them except me.

To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!

When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.

I’m a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let me. Music helps. Good light helps. I love quiet and coffee when I can get them. But I can write on a bus, in a dentist office’s waiting room, in bed with a clip-on booklight, almost anywhere. And I try to do at least some every single day.

To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone else’s work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make it our own.

I would write:"The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam."Or:"The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream.""The old man huddled in the dark doorway, his bony face lit by the burning yellow in the windows of distant skycrapers."My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative.

Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book.

The best stories come from deep within us and are of us. Either our inner child comes out to play and makes all things possible, or we mold our characters and events from our own experiences, or our dreams of wanting to experience.

In the 'Life' of George Eliot, John Walter Cross gave an intriguing account of Eliot's creative method. "She told me that, in all her best writing, there was a 'not herself' which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting," Cross wrote.

Manuscript rejections might tempt you to quit writing or querying. Don't.

There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.

The challenge of the writer is to transform—artistically and imaginatively—a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.

The Paraclete and "Book of Martha" narratives were ultimately versions of the dream of "fixing" of the human species that had driven (and stymied) the Parables books: "On the one hand," she writes in her journal, "I want to write fix-the-world scenario. I seem to need to write them. The fact that I don't believe in them--don't believe humanity is fixable--does create a problem

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written

I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: each time I was overcome with fear. Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons—and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them: they run off—and how will you ever get control of them again! They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper—black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and implore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind.

Indentations on the page, words, my friends, and I will share them with you.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it

We can create transcending stories for readers and for us. Creativity is a double edge sword, which can kill the writer.

If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will.