“My job as the writer is to fool you. Your job as the reader is to see if you can catch me at it.” ~ Sue Grafton
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✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Look Within to Discover Characters
“I believe that to create real-seeming characters, the writer must be willing to go on a voyage of self-exploration. It can be revealing and even painful to explore your own weakness, but it gives you genuine emotion.” ~ Sara Paretsky
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Are You Able to Let Go of Your Story?
“I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story’s asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.” ~ Stephen Graham Jones
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Is Falling In Love with Your Created Character a Bad Idea?
“Writers shouldn’t fall in love with their characters so much that they lose sight of what they’re trying to accomplish. The idea is to write a whole story, a whole book. A writer has to be able to look at that story and see whether or not a character works, whether or not a character needs further definition.” ~ Stephen Coonts
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Write the Story First in Your Mind Then on Paper
“I can’t write a scene unless I’ve visualized it. Unless I can actually see it, and that’s why a lot of reviewers have said my books are very cinematic, because I actually do see them before I write them.” ~ Eric Van Lustbader
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Do You See the Book in Your Mind Before Writing?
“I write my books in my head, and not in a specific study with a view. The view is from my inner eyes.” ~ Wilbur Smith
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Conflict is a Story’s Starting Place
“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.”
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Losing One’s Self in Writing
“Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.” ~ Flannery O’Connor
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Writing as Therapy
“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” ~ Graham Greene
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Ray Bradbury on How to Write a Story
“You don’t pay any attention to anything anyone else says, no opinions. The important thing is to explode with a story, to emotionalize a story, not to think it. You start thinking – the story’s going to die on its feet.” ~ Ray Bradbury
