Even a Great Storyteller Requires Professional Writing Skills

Few writers have what it takes to produce “great writing,” but even a great storyteller requires professional writing skills to get the story across to the reader. The difference between amateur writing and professional writing is rewriting.

MAEVE MADDOX

Punctuation Indicates How the Writer Hears the Prose

Punctuation…indicates how the writer hears the prose, as they create it. So I use ellipses, dashes and commas quite a lot, because they express how things sound to me. Exclamation marks convey moments of passionate overemphasis or profound disorder—like someone shouting in public or bursting into tears. So they make things briefly uncomfortable—and then we go on again.

JOANNA KAVENNA

Writing a Screenplay Is Like Climbing a Mountain

Writing a screenplay is like climbing a mountain. When you’re climbing, all you can see is the rock in front of you and the rock directly above you. You can’t see where you’ve come from or where you’re going.

SYD FIELD

START WRITING

Start writing. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but START WRITING. There is NO SUCH THING as "too late" in the arts. Trust me. START.

PATTON OSWALT

Science and Writing Are Utterly the Same Thing

I think science and writing are utterly the same thing. They are completely rooted in passion and desire, if they're any good at all. You can fall in love with the natural world in the same way you fall in love with a person. There's that same sense of helplessness, of lacking control over how much of your life you want to devote to it.

ANDREA BARRETT

Writing Well Involves Two Gifts

Writing well involves two gifts—the art of adding and the art of taking away. Of the two, the first is more important, since without it the second would not exist.

JOHN UPDIKE

Our Power is Patience

Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

KURT VONNEGUT

Don't Try to Guess What Editors Want

Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

The Worst Thing You Can Do Is Censor Yourself

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

The Writer Must Rescue the Whispered and the Regrettable

If you look at social media, you see this leveling of American culture. Everyone has the same photo of the same beach, the same blue water, same wedding party, same slang, same songs, same movies. We have one lingua franca. We curate ourselves for mass consumption. But real speech, in the moment, in groups of two or three, tears at the veil. What we say that is not recorded. Drunken confession. Botched jokes. The rejected advance. Campfire at a deer camp. The novel as village gossip. The writer must rescue the whispered and the regrettable.

MATTHEW NEILL NULL