73 Quotes Tagged: writing-advice

...story is first, last, and always the experience of aesthetic emotion - the simultaneous encounter of thought and feeling.

A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.

"If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat."

YA doesn't get librarians fired!

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

Writers write because they have stories they need desperately to tell, and things they need just as vitally to say. It's not something where you have to go out and find an idea to write about, they're begging to be written. If you have nothing to say, and no story to tell...and I'm not being harsh, just honest...you're probably not a writer.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

O público quer saber como é estar vivo na ponta da faca do agora. O que significa ser um ser humano hoje?

I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one's misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.

"Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "Individual" (man or woman), "remainder" (rest), "initial" (first), "implement" (do), "sufficient" (enough), "attempt" (try), "referred to as" (called), and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write. Don't dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don't interface with anybody."

Write what should not be forgotten.

I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you,and that you will work with these stories from your life — not someone else's life — water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.

Someone once said that if you steal from one writer, it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from several, it’s called research. So steal from everybody, but steal only a sentence or a phrase at a time. If you use much more than that, you must get permission and then give credit.

"Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too."

What is the worst possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could that turn out to be the best possible thing that could happen to him?