“An outline is crucial. It saves so much time. When you write suspense, you have to know where you’re going because you have to drop little hints along the way. With the outline, I always know where the story is going. So before I ever write, I prepare an outline of 40 or 50 pages.” ~John Grisham
mystery
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Write for an Audience of One (Yourself)
‘Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.’ ~ Chinua Achebe
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Bringing Life Alive in Your Stories
“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.
~ Ernest Hemingway
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Experience Joy in Writing
“Make writing a place of joy. If you only think of writing as this work, as this onus, difficult thing, eventually you will start avoiding it or at least you will not come to it with the enthusiasm and energy. It needs to be what you want to do, what you love to do. You have to give yourself permission to do scary, wonderful exciting things.” ~ Dorothy Allison
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Getting Past Writing Anxiety
“I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.” ~ Philip Roth
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ The 3 Stages of Writing a Book
“I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.” ~ Bernard Malamud
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ What Do You Know Better than Anyone Else?
Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Want to Create a Character that Lasts?
“The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.”
~ Raymond Chandler
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ If You Want to Write, You Have to Read
“It’s just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you’re not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can’t even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I’m not reading just book after book.”
~ Stephen Graham Jones
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Creating a Character?
“When you’re building a character, or at least when I’m building a character, you start saying, ‘How am I going to make people like him?'” ~ John Sandford
