Writing Process Quotes - Page 2

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.

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

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!

... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...

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.

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture — still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish.

Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, literally, responsibility. When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them, we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices.

Talk about something else. Tell me about this book you are writing." "What book?" I say. Then : "Oh, I know what you mean. I am not doing that anymore. I couldn't finish._________I don't think he knows, not really. Not yet. In my haste to finish this story before death overtakes me, inevitably I have left out many things, and often I have expresses myself inelegantly, and no doubt here and there I have said more than I meant to. When you return, my dear type writer, we will review what we have done, and add this and subtract that. This work has become my hobby and my consolation, and I enjoy it.

He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.

We write our life stories detailing our worldly experiences in order to expose the unconscious mind to the world of conscious appreciation. By extending our consciousness, we bring material insights to our emotional forefront. Words lay the foundation for truth telling. The music of our words allows us to train the lightness of language upon the darkness of our own humanity. The taxonomy of the human mind empowers us to employ the magic of language to share information, suggest action, speculate upon the future, reminisce about pastimes, lance our most ragged feelings, and pontificate, with a drunkard’s sense of punchy assuredness, upon any topic that fits our fancy. We tell stories in order to mark our existence, to share both our triumphs and failures, and teach wisdom gained from our previous skirmishes in a convoluted world. In absence of our stories, we do not exist in our own minds or in the minds of our people.

Books most certainly don't write themselves, but life does. When in doubt about what to write, use your own life.

Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.

Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.

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

I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?

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

Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.

He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen times he had begun it and written into it a naked desperation; a dozen times he had begun it and written into it the frosted mathematics of logic. Finally he'd written out quickly the sentences that kept cropping up in all the versions. Those must be, to whatever censor there was in him, the most acceptable ones. He sealed it without rereading it and went out to mail it. An hour later he despised himself for having sent it.

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

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.

In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It’s written for writing’s sake, as if I were to say, “Let me tell you I’m dying.” Well of course I am. So are you.

A writer will always be a writer. It's not a choice, it's a destiny.

Words are the writer's sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They're our enchantment and our temptation

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.

Writing means sharing. It's part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, opinions.

Grab for time to write instead of wait for time.

Writing had never become routine for him, but remained a constant surprise. He was always surprised at how much fun it was, once it all got moving. And never failed to be surprised at how bloody hard it was. It was like having an intense, frustrating love affair with a capricious, gorgeous, and often mean-spirited woman.He loved every moment of it.

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

...the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

I've found that busting your ass on a daily basis to make your art good, clear, and meaningful creates the most luck.

Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that's too much pressure and you'll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.

I’m sorry if...I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you’re trapped in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe forever.

The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. "This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends." He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. "In my mind, they were a whole lot better."Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind.

Never stop writing. Whether you’re writing a novel, screen play or just keeping a journal, it’s integral that you make writing a daily process. The proof of the commitment to your craft is just how much time you spend doing it, whether it’s for business or pleasure. Integrate your craft into your every day life, and you’ll be as good as gold.

Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.

You can do almost anything if you put your mind to it. Be it the perfect murder, robbing a bank or owning your own company. I don’t go along with Prince Charles’ maxim that everyone should know their place and limitations.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

Only my characters truly know what's happening - I just hold the pen

Self-censorship is more efficient than any police. You write and say not what you really think, but what you believe is acceptable. By that process we lose those revolutionary ideas that could change society for the better

When I write, it feels like there are two little creatures that sit on each of my shoulders. One whispers, "You can do this. You've got what it takes." The other sounds like my mother-in-law.

When we make time to write, we can do it anytime, anywhere.

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.

When entering a library, I never forget to bow down!

Our personal story has many chapters that reconnoiter universal themes. We each struggle to understand ourselves and aspire to make ourselves known to the world. We struggle to win the love of other people. We seek to pick all the low hanging fruit that we come across in our journey through the corridor of time. We write our story in the Niagara of emotional experiences that flowing watercourse makes us human. We use a profusion of words, symbols, and the nuances pulled from a rich library of language to depict the cascade of our visions, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, dreams, and infelicitous thoughts. We use logical and dialectal thought processes when communing with our inner self. We use self-speak along with the esemplastic powers of poetic imagination, sprinkled with the fizz of creativity, to cohere disparate chapters of our life into a unified whole and relay the effervescence of our story to other people.

The skill of writing needs much patience, practicing, and time. There is no good writing from a quick effort, or a confused writer.

A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien

Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen.

The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy.And the gods said, “Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

Sometimes when I prepare to write, I feel the same sensation wash over me as if my toes were curling over the brink of a high cliff, my gaze peering downward into a dark pond, and I anxiously wonder, will the water prove deep enough? Will my words be satisfactory?

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer’s is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.