Writing Craft Quotes

I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack

Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

Writing is easy. Writing well is hard work.

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.

If you do not want to be forgotten as soon as you are dead...be read, or try coming back and pull the feet of those who are still alive instead!

Replace your old books with the books you’ve always wanted to write.

When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete...you feel as if you could do anything.

Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. It’s the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.

I like to think I’ve written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters.

I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.

Tighten your prose so the story flows.

...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...

If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

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

The hard part is putting one word after another.

Backstory is like a flavour you can’t quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it’s there and it enhances the flavour, but it’s intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly!

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much?

Today is the day that you create worlds, you change lives, you make a something, a someone, out of nothing.Today is the day you become a writer.

The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.

As a writer: Aim toward becoming keen through a looking glass limn perspective on evoking pleasure of the senses with STRONG VERBS.

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

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.

Authors - trust in your vision.

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

I should be writing ...

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.

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.

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft

I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.

Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb "snuffle.

The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.

Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.

Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.

I recommend writing standing up from time to time. It's easier to dance when you finish writing.

You write what you know, and I know rock and roll.

Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.

It's good to write badly. Things can only get better.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

A clever trick does not a concept make.

You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.