“What a writer has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
mystery
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Don’t Worry about What You’re Writing
““Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover’s quarrel with the world. It’s ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don’t have to worry about learning things. The fire of one’s art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.” ~ James Lee Burke
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Discouraged? Don’t Quit
“Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit.” ~ Andre Dubus
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ On the Struggle to Beginning a Novel
“Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It’s discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.”
~ Barbara Kingsolver
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Two Questions that Guide Novels
“Two questions form the foundation of all novels: ‘What if?’ and ‘What next?’ (A third question, ‘What now?’, is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it’s more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if ‘X’ happened? That’s how you start.” ~ Tom Clancy
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Guiding the Imagination
“A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Writing and Discovering
“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” ~ Robert Frost
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ The Stories Are Already There
“I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there’s a house under there, and I’m pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That’s how I feel. It’s like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: ‘If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.’”
~ Stephen King
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Looking for an Idea?
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape.”
~ Ray Bradbury
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Write What You Love
“Write what you love, what truly piques your curiosity every day. I’ve met authors who have told me they were sick of the subject matter in their books by the time they came out. I’m so glad I don’t feel this way!
“I never tired of learning about the stories of strong women and finding a compelling way to tell those stories. I love to discuss the themes in the book—cultural standards, resilience, overcoming odds, equality, breaking barriers—so even when I’m tired, I’m always energized by the opportunity to have meaningful conversations around this work.” ~ Haley Shapley
