If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
RAY BRADBURY
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
KURT VONNEGUT
All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
ERICA JONG
Don’t ever submit a screenplay less than 100 pages or more than 140 pages in length. And don’t cheat by using wide margins or changing font size. Screenplays are printed in Courier or Courier New fonts, size 12. Place one-inch margins top, right, and bottom. Place one- to two-inch margins on the left. The average film script runs 110 to 120 pages, which translates, almost without exception, into a minute of film per page of script. You can’t fool us.
TONY BILL
I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten,—happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
BRENDA UELAND
Write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.
GERTRUDE STEIN
Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination.
ROBERT FROST
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
NEIL GAIMAN
Stay away from irony or satire. There’s very little money in it. You’re likely to wind up with reviews—like some of mine—that say, “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” There’s no such question in Dickens. Most readers would prefer to know exactly where they stand, where the author stands, and how to respond. Ergo, no irony permitted.
BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN
My feeling is that there's no such thing as nonfiction. Everything is fiction, because in the moment someone tries to relate an experience of what happened to them, it's gone. The reality that was felt at the moment is almost impossible to describe. It's one reason why there are writers, to come close to how it felt when it happened.
NORMAN MAILER
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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