#process

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#creative-process #writing #writing-process

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle. ↗

— Mickey Spillane

#writing-craft #writing-process #writing-process

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer... ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#writing-process #writing-process

Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#writing-process #writing-process

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. (Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935) ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#expectations #honesty #integrity #on-writing #pandering

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. ↗

— William Edgar Stafford

#poetry #thinking #writing #writing-process

Movement implies development and not evolution (C.F.D. Moule)." ~R. Alan Woods [2013] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#developmental #evolutionary-process #movements #r-alan-woods #r-alan-woods

There is a ruthlessness to the creative act. It often involves a betrayal of the status quo. ↗

— Alan Watt

#writing-advice #writing-from-the-heart #writing-process #writing-advice

To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will fin that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#inspirational #writing #writing-process #inspirational

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#creativity #writing #writing-advice #writing-process #writing-advice