#process

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#writing-process

Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things. ↗

— Harlan Ellison

#writing-process

Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters. ↗

— Teresa Mummert

#reality #writing #writing-process #writing-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

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