#tin

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him. ↗

— William Faulkner

#writing-advice #vanity

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

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

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke. ↗

— Mark Twain

#clever #exclamation-point #writing #writing-advice

It's okay to write crap. Just don't try publishing it while it's still crap. ↗

— S.M. Blooding

#writing-advice

Shut up, Ray. ↗

— Henry Kuttner

#writing-advice #writing-advice

It's easy to make up weird stuff. It gets trickier when you want the weird stuff to be interesting and make sense. ↗

— Brandon Mull

#fiction #writing #fantasy-fiction

I think ‘slow writing’ is the answer when the feeling of burn out threatens, something akin to the ‘slow food’ movement. Anxiety and panic are counterproductive to the creative process. ↗

— Rosaleen Love

#food

Intensive mothering is the ultimate female Olympics: We are all in powerful competition with each other, in constant danger of being trumped by the mom down the street, or in the magazine we're reading. The competition isn't just over who's a good mother--it's over who's the best. We compete with each other; we compete with ourselves. The best mothers always put their kids' needs before their own, period. The best mothers are the main caregivers. For the best mothers, their kids are the center of the universe. The best mothers always smile. They always understand. They are never tired. They never lose their temper. They never say, "Go to the neighbor's house and play while Mommy has a beer." Their love for their children is boundless, unflagging, flawless, total. Mothers today cannot just respond to their kids' needs, they must predict them--and with the telepathic accuracy of Houdini. They must memorize verbatim the books of all the child-care experts and know which approaches are developmentally appropriate at different ages. They are supposed to treat their two-year-olds with "respect." If mothers screw up and fail to do this on any given day, they should apologize to their kids, because any misstep leads to permanent psychological and/or physical damage. Anyone who questions whether this is the best and the necessary way to raise kids is an insensitive, ignorant brute. This is just common sense, right? ↗

— Susan J. Douglas

#parenting #age

Josie, life is not a Mills and Boon book. People fall out of love. People disappoint other people and they find it very hard to forgive. ↗

— Melina Marchetta

#disappoint #forgive #josephine #life #out-of-love

The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#writing #art