Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled...

I like to play around with my nightmares. Whenever I have a bad dream – something strange and unnerving – I write it down, sometimes in the middle of the night when everyone around me...

I have written until I fell asleep with my computer on my lap. That can’t be normal.

Humor is so subjective, not everyone is going to get what you are peddling. Others will be offended when what you meant no offense whatsoever. Those are the stakes. You have to be able to...

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It’s tradition and form—fear of the unknown—driving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can...

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.

He who could write so easily, who could spend a thousand words down along his plunging fingers on the green-rubber keyboard of his machine, had stumbled like a first-grader over this single paragraph. A dozen...

My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in...

…the secret to writing is to get your own pain – shout it out till it hurts your throat – weep it into your pillow – then write it down …

Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.

Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly...

In the ‘Life’ of George Eliot, John Walter Cross gave an intriguing account of Eliot’s creative method. “She told me that, in all her best writing, there was a ‘not herself’ which took possession of...

Foreword: Life is tension or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the...

Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere.

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, ‘This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone!

Don’t think too much. There’ll be time to think later. Analysis won’t help. You’re chiseling now. You’re passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There’s something there. It isn’t...

Yeah, episodic doesn’t work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it’s just narrative shit.

Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn’t easy, but it’s fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.

Os livros são escritos por quem não teve sorte na vida. Por quem odeia um bocadinho a vida tal como ela é. Inventar uma que não existe ou denunciar aquela que persiste acaba por ser...

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O’Brien

When I’m writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I’m editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.

Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.

There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will...

All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully...

Someone asked me, ‘How do you write a book?’ I said, ‘I live with a pen in one hand.

There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and...

The challenge of the writer is to transform—artistically and imaginatively—a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.

If you have a story to tell, put it out there. Get the thing done. No excuses. No procrastinating. No apologies. It will never be as good as you want it to be, so forget...

You have to stop and freeze the moment,” he told me I had told her. “You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to...

I’m really just playing when I write. I feel like I’m a kid again. I want my characters to do and say things like when I played with dolls!

manuscriptmeanuscriptmoanuscriptmanurescriptand so on

If the writer doesn’t sweat, the reader will.

…the answer is not in the damn blank page – it’s in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up – exhume the past again …

Pencil. Paper. Forget the world.

A hammer made of deadlines is the surest tool for crushing writer’s block.

Research” is a wonderful word for writers. It serves as excuse for EVERYTHING

There’s an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony...

Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.

On the Writing Process:”When in doubt, take it out.,

Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

I’m not gonna lie…sometimes this whole writing thing is a lonely business.

For me, not knowing your theme until your finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe – there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there’s a high chance...

Writing is the thing that props me up.

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a...

« L’écrit ça arrive comme le vent, c’est nu, c’est de l’encre, c’est l’écrit, et ça passe comme rien d’autre ne passe dans la vie, rien de plus, sauf elle, la vie. »

To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don’t come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated....