The most important piece of writing advice: Have something to say. Whenever I have trouble writing, it’s because I’m trying to write about something I don’t care about. Once I know what I’m trying to say, writing is a joy. Other advice: read, read, read.
GRETCHEN RUBIN
Writing is like playing the guitar. There’s no substitute for practice. Guidance and models and goals are good, and you have to listen to really good guitarists/read really good writers and pay attention to how they do it (listening to your exact peers fumble isn’t as helpful), but mainly you have to do it. With passion, for which there’s also no substitute.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing – I suppose that's what a vocation means – at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.
ROBERT LOWELL
Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.
ANNE LAMOTT
I love first sentences because they are full of promise. I like to think of them as an introductory handshake made of words, one that can’t be too limp, too strong, too eager or sweaty.
UNA LaMARCHE
The reason it’s worth standing up for punctuation is not that it’s an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapors when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
LYNNE TRUSS
Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.
ROBERT McKEE
Writing a novel is like making love, but it’s also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it’s like making love while having a tooth pulled.
DEAN KOONTZ
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we’d rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.
SUSAN SONTAG
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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