Writing Quotes - Page 49

Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.

[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.

Passion makes you good, but pride stops you to get better.

But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

How about we be the light of Jesus Christ? There are things we tend to forget when fear becomes the driving force. The world is filled with a lot of questions now; what do we do? Who do we elect? How do we fix this? Some people feel powetless in those ways. Helpless, hopeless, confused, overwhelmed.What do we do?My answer: Stop looking for practical advice "don't be afraid " "those who are with us are more than those who are with them"2 kings 6:16

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

I think poor poetry writing skills are excused when you’re simply trying to flush out emotions.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

It seems as if I can only thing if I write my journal, it just connects the part of my head that is busy doing things with the part that is busy thinking about everything else. I know all these pepole are so busy because they love each other and me. We are a noisy crowd of love

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

The only way to be inclined to write is to write to your inclination.

Inspiration doesn't always come in chronological order.

It's still strange.

She opened her eyes once again and let them drift across the scene laid out before her like a page from a storybook. Inky blackness hung above them as though painted in impasto in an opaque Prussian Blue. The impression it gave was of a sky hand-crafted out of felt with a pearl of a moon and a generous dusting of diamonds sprinkled on for the stars. A night dreams were made of.

I had a dream about you last night. I was writing a ‘Sex for dummies-Christians That Secretly What to be Porn Stars- 1st edition.’ And you helped me with the illustrations.

When you write a story, don't just write it - live it;When putting words into the mouth of a protagonist (or any character) imagine yourself saying them and while writing about the reaction of the listener, write it the way you would react.Let the conversations not be meant merely to be read but felt as well.If you do not feel what you write; how can you expect the readers to feel it?

I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending.

...with a click, my novel would be born; it would come out into the light suddenly transformed from the hypothetical text composed in my imagination into finished, tangible thing with a real and independent existence. The moment of clicking on the print button always gave rise to strange and powerful ambivalence--a combination of self-satisfaction, gloom and anxiety. Self-satisfaction for having finished writing the book. Gloom because taking my leave of the characters has the same effect on me as when a group of friends have to depart. And anxiety, perhaps because I am on the verge of delivering up into other people's hands something that I treasure.

... endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference in quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.

Go thy way, weigh me the weight of the fire, or measure me the blast of the wind, or call me again the day that is past.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

Relationship are easy when times are good, BUT THE TRUE TEST IS WHAT YOU DO WHEN ( ONE IS BLIND AND OTHER IS VICTIM OF SILENCE ) AND TIMES ARE TOUGH.

Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped. I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag. Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene.

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.Trust your demon.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

Is it not funny, in the presence of an unlimited God, we will still be stucked? Sometimes faith overwrites the fact, that some people have not come to realise. Stop giving excuses and telling God what is happening around you. You have the tools.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insect's wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words.

Your story must told.Live a life legacy- written book or notes.This will be there for many generations to know your rich experiences and knowledge.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it

Life is a book. Do you not realise we are writing the history of our time?

We live today amid ritualized anithumanisms. Among those intelligent enough to feel despair, some seek salvation in the literary artist. Artists love flattery; and the scam doesn't work without mystifying the process.The weather is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious.Wall Street is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious. Writing is unpredictable, (like street and sky, there are too many variables.) Its mystery vanishes, like a shadow, the moment the light aimed at your characters turns back upon yourself.

The need to document my insanity is an affliction I have not yet cured myself of...

Everything has its poetry. 94

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.

Dalam mengarang saya tidak pernah tergesa-gesa. Saya anggap pekerjaan mengarang adalah tugas yang santai, yang harus dikerjakan dengan senang hati. Kalau saya menulisnya dengan terburu-buru, berarti dengan hati yang kesal, maka dapat dipastikan bahwa si pembaca pun akan merasakannya.

And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.

Utopias bore me. I'm interested in constructing messy, complicated societies that are full of flaws and then saying, ooh, this is interesting, let's see what happens if I poke it here. And concurrently with this and the previous point, I'm interested in making up cultures that are different

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it

The audience-- the book's actual cast-- quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material-- surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality-- had to be reshaped.

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

Write something worth reading and your voice will be heard.

I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

we do not write as we want but as we can

It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?

A writer sets up his own amazing experiment: his work of fiction.

J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]

...I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do...

I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need,and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I became what I wrote.

The day when on the cover of my books, my name will appear in bigger fond than the title of my book- I will stop writing because that would be the death of the writer in me.

It's easy to want to be an author. You see it in your mind with sun streaming through windows and a Siamese cat purring on an antique rug and a little pellet stove and somehow the bills are paid and there's wit and self-sufficiency and divine inspiration seeping through walls and pores. And then, in your mind, you skip ahead to a book launch party and more Siamese cats.When you graduate from wanting to working, you say, "I am going to flesh out this idea and write the whole thing down, and rewrite it, and rewrite it again, and rewrite it unendingly, and I'll have no real assurance of when it'll be good enough, but at some point I'll pitch it to someone who will decide if I'm delusional or not." The optimism and the ego-bruising, unsexy work needed to follow through feels unending.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Some of the people who hate me love some of the sentences that I have written, until they get to the name of the person to whom the sentences are attributed.