“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
poems
✒️ 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
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ The Key to Being a Successful Writer
Keep your head down, avoid all the distractions of being a writer today . . .and write the best story that you can. It sounds a bit glib, but I think this is advice a lot of people are having trouble following right now. It is so hard to focus. But that is the single key to success. ~ Jeff Abbott
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ How Do You End Each Chapter?
“I try to end every chapter with an air of suspense. I try to leave the reader wanting to turn the page.” ~ Nelson DeMille
