writer’s block

“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be.”

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If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.”

“Nearly always in my mind a story begins with a character or characters. This holds good though the main interest of the story may be incident or the surprise of its plot. Making the story is with me the process of providing these people with things to do and say which will express them. I never began with a title (they are my plague), or a setting. Once or twice with a situation. Occasionally with a sentence which came into my mind from heaven knows where.”

~ H. C. Bailey

“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”

~ Stephen King

“Start telling the stories that only you can tell.”

“I’ve often said that there’s no such thing as writer’s block; the problem is idea block. When I find myself frozen-whether I’m working on a brief passage in a novel or brainstorming about an entire book-it’s usually because I’m trying to shoehorn an idea into the passage or story where it has no place.”

~ Jeffrey Deaver

“In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.”

~ Stephen King

“My job as the writer is to fool you. Your job as the reader is to see if you can catch me at it.”

As a writer, you paint strokes and leave suggestions so readers can create their own pictures. That allows you to know someone by a small action and it saves countless pages of explanation.  ~ Mary Higgins Clark