writing

“The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end.”

~ Lee Child

“You never learn how to write a novel.

You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.”

Gene Wolfe

“I think that all writers feel alienated. … I know that I do. … I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.”

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

“You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.”

~ Ian Mcewan

“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.”