fiction writing

Writer Ursula K. Le Guin on Dialogue

by

All I can recommend is to read/speak your dialogue aloud. Not whispering, not muttering, OUT LOUD. (Virginia Woolf used to try out her dialogue in the bathtub, which greatly entertained the cook downstairs.) This will help show you what’s fakey, hokey, bookish — it just won’t read right out loud. Fix it till it does. Speaking it may help you to vary the speech mannerisms to suit the character. And probably will cause you to cut a lot. Good! Many contemporary novels are so dialogue-heavy they seem all quotation marks — disembodied voices yaddering on in a void.  ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Open Culture

Author Ursula K. LeGuin Daily Routine

by

Source: Open Culture

Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #30

by

Work then, hard work, prepares the way for the first stages of relaxation, when one begins to approach what Orwell might call Not Think! As in learning to typewrite, a day comes when the single letters a-s-d-f and j-k-l-; give what to a flow of words. ~ Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #28

by

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. ~ Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #26

by

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. Make your own individual spectroscope reading. Then, you, a new Element, are discovered, charted, and named! ~ Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #24

by

[The writer’s] greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. ~ Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #23

by

Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. ~ Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #22

by

What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn’t it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, ‘That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful.’ ~ Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #18

by

We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.  ~ Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #17

by

Dandelion Wine, like most of my books and stories was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. … No one told me to surprise myself … I learned to let my senses and past, tell me all that was somehow true. ~ Ray Bradbury

Verified by MonsterInsights