You Have To Write

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS

If You Want Your Writing To Be Taken Seriously...

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

URSULA K. LeGUIN

Finding Out is the Best Part of Writing

Before I begin to write I fill a notebook, jotting down everything that pops into my head about my characters and story—bits of dialogue, ideas for scenes, background information, descriptions of people and places, details and more details. But even with my notebook, I still don't know everything. For me, finding out is the best part of writing.

JUDY BLUME

A Novel Begins with a Pang

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head. And you think, “I could write a novel about this.”

MARTIN AMIS

Writing Is Like Sex

Writing is like sex. You have to save your love for the love object. If you go around spouting about your idea, there’ll be no “charge” left. You can’t father children that way.

RAY BRADBURY

Cut Without Mercy

What lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what’s it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

ISAAC ASIMOV

Don’t Use Words Too Big for the Subject

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. LEWIS

A Writer Can Begin Anywhere

Somewhere in his journals Dostoyevsky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pray and dig away long enough, and lo! soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

SAUL BELLOW

Writing Is Not Hard

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy—it's the occurring that's hard.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

If You Wanna Write Movies...

If you wanna write movies, you can’t stop after you get pissed on and rejected, ’cause you’re gonna get pissed on and rejected. Nobody wants your stuff. Once you become somebody, they’ll read it—but nobody wants to give anybody their first shot.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN