Writing Advice Quotes - Page 3

Writing a full length novel is very much like driving a car with snakes in your pants—you just never know what’s going to happen. -- James Scott Bell

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...

I take the rawest, realest moments in anyone’s life and I open them up and lay them bare. The innocence of a five year old child, the awkwardness of a teenager’s first sexual encounter, the heartbreak of longing for a relationship you can’t have, confronting the possibility of the death of your newborn child, whatever it is, you open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day. You have to put yourself out there as a writer, you can’t play it safe. Great writing isn’t safe.

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely. We can unlock our lives with a pencil tip.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

The written word is greatest sacred documentation.

Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.

Writing at its best is simply taking dictation from your soul.

Aspiring novelists should be taught that the old adage, “Write about what you know,” isn’t limited to what you have personally experienced. Vicarious experience is also a great part of what you know. Read a lot of history and it becomes part of your store of knowledge, part of what you’re prepared to write about. The same goes for stories and memories that other people share with you.

Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.

You never know what you will write until you write it

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.

A love of writing is far greater than any word count.