Writing Advice Quotes

Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

How do you paint a writer's block?Just fill it with fifty shades of black.

...how many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely...

All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.

Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the

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

...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...

When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.

Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.

Not knowing stuff - like how your story ends before you start writing - is the seed of a lot of writer’s block.

Writers, that deep dark secret is not something you should hide from the world. It is your gift. Take it from memory and illuminate it in literature,shake the dust from it, unless it will get you arrested, lol.

Publish. Be damned. Repeat.

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

I made a decision long ago not to make any apologies. Romance rocks, and even though my books don't actually fall into the romance genre, I tout them as very much being about the romance. It's fun. We're all obsessed with it. And it's human nature. Remember, NO APOLOGIES! Write what 's in your heart!

Write what you want to write and would like to read, not for any invisible audience. Your readers will find you.

Originality is not writing the story that has never been told, but writing the stories only you can tell.

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.

Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.

On Writing: "A multitude of improbabilities can be forgiven as long as enough plausibility has been established.

It's all mine, it's all sacred.

TODAY IS A GREAT DAY TO MAKE ART.

Audiences will admire your character’s strength but connect with them through their weakness.

Plot comes from the mind but the characters come from the heart!

Rhythm, repetition, making patterns--these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument/object we call a poem or a story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn't lose power in revisiting. Writing is not just to know, it is also to console. We need to be reminded that we are part of the obscure rhythm of birth and decade. It is the humming that matters.

Let your characters lead when you're dancing together.

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice." -Cheryl L. Ilov, Forever Fit and Flexible: Feeling Fabulous at Fifty and Beyond.

... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.

You were meant to write this book.

It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.

Here’s my advice: you hold in your heart everything you need to know to write anything your story needs written. Dig deep and go where the pain and fear and joy are, and put it out there. The minute you shy away from pure honesty in your writing, you become a liar and people will smell it. People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material…..

Some artists benefit less from being interviewed than they do from being left alone.

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

To be a writer - write! To be an author - publish! To be a bestselling author - never stop writing!

Live inside your stories, yes, but do not hide behind them.

I believe you can consider yourself a successful prose writer when the number of words you put on a page each day is equal to, or greater than, the number of milligrams of mind-altering chemicals you ingest in that day. (Note: this rule does not apply to poets who write in the short-form. You, my boys and girls, are free as birds!)

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.

I am grateful to the Lord for blessing my path as a writer.

You ought to write down the glow of thoughts as it’s ignites.

I think the first draft is so challenging because that elusive BALANCE is so challenging.

What is writing but an expression of my own life?

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

...some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ...

...authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer...

I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.

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

You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

You will do well not to write for money, not because you won't get rich doing it, but because writing fueled by that sort of motivation becomes dull and lifeless and mediocre.

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.

There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.

I am sorry, I am not a writer. I simply put my thoughts on paper. Those helped by them call them a book and me a writer. Those who are not helped call it rubbish and me a fool. Both have reason.

To master magical realism, one must make the real seem unreal but, more importantly, make the unreal seem real.