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“Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” ~ Meg Rosoff 

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“Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.”

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“I try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage,.I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.” ~ James M. Cain

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“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

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‘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

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“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

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“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

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“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

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“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

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Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

~ Raymond Carver