mystery

“I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.” ~ Alice Hoffman

Source

“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces. If your inner critic continues to plague you with invidious comparisons, scream, ‘Ancestor worship!’ and leave the building.” ~ Allegra Goodman

Source

“”Write what you know. Every guide for the aspiring author advises this. Because I live in a long-settled rural place, I know certain things. I know the feel of a newborn lamb’s damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities. And I know other kinds of emotional truths that I believe apply across the centuries.” ~ Geraldine Brooks

Source

“But there’s one thing I’m sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” ~ Stephen King

“Writing . . . is about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”

“Part of me becomes the characters I’m writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.” ~ Louis Sachar

Source

Whether you’re in the stage of elevating a finished draft or staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page, consider how tapping into your own emotional truths can flesh out your characters and plot. Ask yourself:

• When in your life have you felt an acute urgency to act? How can you tap into that memory (sensory details, actions, pacing) to empower a scene?
• When was a moment in your life where you felt extreme [insert the needed emotion here]? How did your view of the world shift as you felt this way? What subtleties of that emotion could be brought to the page in atmosphere, mood, or tone.
• When have you been up against a roadblock, when you’ve been unsure how you would ever get past it? How did you react? What did you do? What was brewing inside you? How can this moment enhance your protagonist’s drive?

~ Kris Spisak

Source

“When you have an important story to tell, the words you need seem to come of their own accord.”

~ A. Jance

Source

“I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.” ~ Tony Hillerman

Source

“In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who’s sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer’s attitude toward the particular story he’s decided to tell.”

~ Donald E. Westlake