Writing Quotes - Page 88

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.

Band together with the brothers and sisters of misery and never stray. You are the integral part of the deeply depressed. We found you. Hooray.

You were meant to write this book.

i never begin my writings with talent. i begin them with strong emotions and liquor. they finish with talent.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

Because I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.

If you don't write, then read.

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.

The Kingdom of God does not come by Observation. It is hidden in the inner dimension.

Do you think you’re not ‘ready’ to start that big story idea/project you’ve been thinking about forever?Jump in. Write anyway. The only way to make the impossible a reality is to take a leap of faith.

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.

One of the general patterns of good (i.e., striking and memorable) writing is the effect of repetition. If you use a certain element—a plot device, an image, a noticeable phrase—once, readers may or may not notice it consciously, but it doesn’t disturb the flow of their reading. If you use that element twice, they won’t notice it consciously—but they will notice it subconsciously, and it will add to the resonance of the writing or to their sense of depth and involvement (and if it’s a plot device, it will heighten the dramatic tension). But if you use that element three times, everybody will notice it the third time you do it.

Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.

Loneliness is your only companion.

Creativity is divine.

Have tea, might write,” Laura returned.

How to Write a PoemCatch the airaround the butterfly.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume.

How do you feel when you read stuff written by dead authors? A visit by a ghost?

And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.

Write to your heart’s content and by all means, have fun with your creation. It’s your moment to do absolutely anything within those pages.

i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.

He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]

Life is flinching in the midst of breathing, gasping at the thought of dying. It’s climbing ropeless up sheer rock faces, groping for the next finger-hole of hope. Steady on! Only a thousand feet to go and after that a jungle, a minefield, a rapids. (Can I stop smiling now?)Once, not long ago, I was flung off the cliff of the moment, thrust into an illicit relationship with destiny, an affair not of my making. Was I making love or being raped? The lines were fuzzy.

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

It was more than a string of letters put togetherit was a thick cloak in the coldand a strong defense against an enemyIt was more than the naked heart on paperit was a way to undress sadness … and sinsand an olive branch for the desperateWriting was her prayer and the words were felt.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.

I can't help thinking of Jackson Pollock, who poured, splattered and lashed the canvass with strings of paint. His process was about snaring not only a vision, but the moment the vision occurred to him. The paint becomes a net cast around something too fast to be caught. The bare spaces between the net's strands are as significant as the strands themselves because they hint at what can't be painted, can't be described.

The movementOf the body isWhere poetryBegins

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you've already got.

There is nothing to writing. You nourish your creativity for months and years until you release your baby out into the world.

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.

Emily wondered whether Artie would be so carefree if he knew The Book Club was performing grand theft imagination.

With discipline, you can lose weight, you can excel in work, you can win the war.

A writer's tragedy: to know all the words and nothing else.

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

There is a part of everything which is unexplored,because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn’t work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It’s world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.

I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you MUST write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.

My grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together! For now it would be heavier than the sand of the desert.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words a paragraph no unnecessary sentences for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline but that every word tell.

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.

Like a bird, my thoughts were flying away so I became a writer to cage my thoughts with paper and pen. You should not call me a writer but rather a catcher of thoughts.

A butler supplies food to nourish your body, but a writer nourishes your mind through writing.

In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]

Artistry exists in everyone. What makes it blossom is a soul's personal desire to find an outlet for expression.

Parents never you make church and studying the word of God optional for your children. If they are in your house, get them up, teach them the word of God, the greatest awards, PhD or achievements any child could have is to grow up in the word of God. I and my family are living witness and it is extending to our third generation.

There are some places you can't visit anymore,poetry and writings take you there.

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more