#craft

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged. ↗

— Koren Zailckas

#emotions #families #family #family-therapy #memoir

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

— Neil Gaiman

#writing-advice #writing-craft #writing-life #writing-process #life

I don’t just want a gripping story line. I shoot for the three dimensional literary Braille to a silent Scorsese movie ↗

— Carl Henegan

#writing-craft #movies

He took the sacramental chalice, and stretching forth his bare arm, cried in a loud voice, 'Come ye viewless ministers of this dread hour! come from the fenny lake, the hanging rock, and the midnight cave! The moon is red - the stars are out - the sky is burning - and all nature stands aghast at what we do!' Then replacing the sacred vessel on the altar, he drew, one by one, from different parts of his body, from his knotted hair, from his bosom, from beneath his nails, the unholy things which he cast into it. 'This,' said he, 'I plucked from the beak of a raven feeding on a murderer's brains! This is the mad dog's foam! These the spurgings of a dead man's eyes, gathered since the rising of the evening star! This is a screech-owl's egg! This a single drop of black blood, squeezed from the heart of a sweltered toad! This, an adder's tongue! And here, ten grains of the gray moss that grew upon a skull which had lain in the charnel-house three hundred years! What! Not yet?' And his eyes seemed like balls of fire as he cast them upwards. 'Not yet? I call ye once! I call ye twice! Dare ye deny me! Nay, then, as I call ye thrice, I'll wound mine arm, and as it drops, I'll breathe a spell shall cleave the ground and drag you here!' ("The Forsaken Of God") ↗

— William Mudford

#black-magick #incantation #magick #satanism #spell

Witch' is just a religion, okay? No baby-sacrificing, no Black Masses, no sending imps out to scare the dog-snot out of kids, trying to make them think they're crazy. We don't do things like that. Our number-one law is 'Have fun in this lifetime, but don't hurt anybody.' Nice little paraphrase of "An it harm none, do as ye will" if I do say so myself. ↗

— Mercedes Lackey

#witchcraft #witches #religion

Well in those parts (upcountry India) they have were-tigers, or think they have, and I must say that in this case, so far as sworn and uncontested evidence went, they had every ground for thinking so. However, as we gave up witchcraft prosecutions about three hundred years ago, we don’t like to have other people keeping on our discarded practices; it doesn’t seem respectful to our mental and moral position. ↗

— Saki

#superstitions #witchcraft #respect

A blank page is no empty space. It is brimming with potential... It is a masterpiece in waiting -- yours. ↗

— A.A. Patawaran

#getting-started #writing-craft #writing-craft

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass. ↗

— Bernard Cornwell

#readers-and-writers #writing-craft #writing-craft

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

— Flannery O'Connor

#writing-craft

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