The Craft Quotes
A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.
Marketing is the perfect blend or art and science. But more than that, marketing is a craft.
I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.
This is the secret to mastering any discipline: as you conquer one, you'll find it easier to tackle another.
In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said "It is the trade entering his body.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casual
Don’t write what you know—what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you—and interests you deeply—and your readers will catch fire at your words.
Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick—then it’s personal. The bad guy isn’t just the “bad guy” anymore, he’s the BAD GUY!
If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.
I’ve come to the end of another book alive. At times like this I’m always at a loss for words.
My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess.
The paradox of writing is that you’re trying to use words to express what words can’t express.
You could say, in a way, that I'm not actually a writer, though perhaps I might be called a recorder? ... I just happen to be one of those holding the pen, that's all.
It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.
There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.
Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.
I have this idea that writing is all about divergent thinking colliding with a hurricane of emotions.
All great movies have one thing in common: every frame of every scene could stand alone as a work of art. Why should it be different in a book?
An obscure flesh-and-blood Gascon, forgotten by History, transformed into a legendary giant by the novelist's genius
The best lie is the one that has an element of truth, so it’s good to include something real in your fiction.
Don’t polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes aren’t improvements, they’re just changes.
Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.
Inspiration is the crèche of your brainchildren. If you don’t feed them, they will die, and never come back. So someone please think about the children!
People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.
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.
The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination
the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.
One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.
How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be 'and, ' 'the, ' and 'I, ' and 'it, ' and so on, and there's a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you.
The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.
When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?
From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet... technology progression yes... style?
...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts.
It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing
What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) ... it's that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader's heart.
