#writ

Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she walked away from thinking, "I can do better that this. Hell, I am doing better than this!" What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize that his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff? Good writing on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy--"I'll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand"--but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing--of being flattened, in fact--is part of every writer's necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. So we read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read in order to experience different styles. ↗

— Stephen King

#experience

Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books. ↗

— G. I. Gurdjieff

#anyone #book #books #ceremony #contains

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it. ↗

— David Guterson

#book #doing #emerge #even #i

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting. ↗

— Mark Haddon

#exotic #foreign #i #i think #interesting

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear. ↗

— Helen Dunmore

#both #conscious #ear #head #how

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#creative #creative writing #creative writing programs #foreign #foreign languages

I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#aside #better #draft #drafts #everyday

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is. ↗

— Taylor Hackford

#cast #contribution #director #film #fit

Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field. ↗

— Jane Haddam

#audience #conferences #conventions #field #fights

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place. ↗

— Margaret Haddix

#i #i can #long #manuscript #place