writing

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

~ Ian Mcewan

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”

~ Lawrence Block

“Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.” 

~ Jennifer Egan

“There’s lots of things that can’t make it in the world that are worth making. There are lots of great artists who never make it, there are lots of great writers who don’t get published – is it still worthwhile? Aren’t we glad people are still doing it?”

~ Dana Spiotta

“A great writer created a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.”

~ Cyril Connolly

“The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.”

~ Havelock Ellis

“A lot of time, with stories, I’ll start out with a title and try to dream myself into the story that it evokes – a kind of subconscious exercise in which I’m trawling for some kind of entryway into fiction.”

~ Dan Chaon 

n order to even begin to learn how to play his instrument, it takes the guitarist weeks to build calluses on his fingertips; it takes the saxophonist months to strengthen his lip so that he might play his instrument for only a five-minute stretch; it can take the pianist years to develop dual hand and multiple finger coordination. Why do writers assume they can just “write” with no training whatsoever-and then expect, on their first attempt, to be published internationally? What makes them think they’re so much inherently greater, need so much less training than any other artists?

~ Noah Lukeman

“Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.”

~ Jack London

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” 

~ William Faulkner