The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.

Try everything; listen to everyone. Follow no one. You are your own story guru!

Theoretically there’s no reason one should get [writer’s block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately...

With the right tools, you can write anything …

The best way in the world for breaking up a writer’s block is to write a lot.

Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot...

True writers know that writing is not something they feel required to do,or to make a living they must do, it is quite frankly like breathing. Somecan breathe often and fluently, some short breaths, some...

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose...

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed...

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.

Maybe you didn’t need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn’t need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you’d lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do...

She meant you have to live a story for a time.”And?”And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?”Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.”Kind of the perfect question to answer in...

No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.

She wrote about herself through the lens of her father.”The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just...

Writing a novel is like traveling the universe on foot.

dynamite the world” the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling—out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his...

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire...