“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” ~ William Wordsworth
“The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if “X” happened? That’s how you start.”
“Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.”
~ Matthew Arnold
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” ~Sylvia Plath
“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
“Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
“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
“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
‘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
