Writing Craft Quotes

Writing Craft Quote of the day

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Writer's block? I've never heard of a plumber complain about plumber's block.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

It's the writing that teaches you.

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

Storytellers don't show, they tell. I'm sticking with that.

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

Part of being a writer is defending your vision and not caving in to outside pressures.

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

I just write whenever I can.

Any thing is interesting if you can communicate it. There are no unimportant subjects for the enlivened mind.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.