Writing Craft Quotes

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.

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.

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...

Writing is a team sport.

Good writing is more about graft and craft than inspiration and aspiration.

How many great gems were lost to thoughtand not put down to pen.You can but think of just a fewand then they're lost again.

Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

...the most beautiful things don't always make you happy - often they make you weep...

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three

For me, not knowing your theme until your finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe – there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there’s a high chance it won’t work.

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

I tell everyone who asks me about writing...almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it's that 290 or so pages in between that are tough!

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.

Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.

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.

I have this idea that writing is all about divergent thinking colliding with a hurricane of emotions.

The best lie is the one that has an element of truth, so it’s good to include something real in your fiction.

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.

The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination

For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.

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.

An idea for a story can be anything. The sky is not the limit, the limit is beyond it.

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.

Doubt is the only reliable source of creativity.

Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie....

This whole show vs tell concept both bewilders and challenges my mind.

Find the problem, find the story.

Pursue knowledge as though it is your life-blood, then you will know greatness!

You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.

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

Don’t polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes aren’t improvements, they’re just changes.

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.

I'm my characters' galley slave.

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

Voice is really about letting your characters loose.

One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.

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.

During 30 years of earning my daily bread as a writer I have learned many lessons about our craft. The most significant of those lessons is that I still have many lessons to learn about out craft.

If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.

Writing is my oxygen. Music is my carbon dioxide.

You are not an "author, " you are a writer. If your books are still selling like hotcakes ten years after your demise, THEN you're an author.

... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...

Telling a story is like playing a fiddle. No one want's to hear it when it's done badly