#writ

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

I'm about to start reading it again, because what good is a story you only want to read once? ↗

— Bill Willingham

#fantasy-fiction #unwritten-preface #fantasy-fiction

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

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

You may be a serious writer if …. 10. your hard drive is littered with random notes and story ideas … but not nearly as littered as your head. 9. you keep pen and paper next to your bed. And in the glove compartment. And in your gym bag. Also on the rim of the bathtub. 8. a day without Roget’s Thesaurus is a day without sunshine. 7. your emotional landscape includes creativity, confidence, elation, frustration, and the occasional neurosis. 6. you’ve ever had to clean peanut butter and bread crumbs off your keyboard, because the work was going well, and you didn’t want to stop for lunch. 5. grammar and punctuation turn you on. 4. your interest in a new acquaintance is directly proportionate to his/her potential as a secondary character. 3. you’ve worn the white e, r, s, and t clean off your keyboard. 2. the search history on your web browser would raise red flags with the FBI, CIA, DEA, and mental health professionals everywhere. 1. you have stories to tell, and you just. Keep. Telling. Them. ↗

— Kathy Disanto

#writers-on-writing #writing-life #mental-health