First time I ever put pen to paper, I had one goal – to build something no one had ever thought of before.

Menulis cerita pendek dan novel bukanlah sesuatu hal yang dapat aku lakukan dengan mudah dan menyenangkan.

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare...

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higher” you – brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder.

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally...

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, ‘I don’t think Chaucer...

Lewis had said that there is no creativity de novo in us—that we are all sub-creators pirating and rearranging portions of reality. I agreed. But it was only an idea. And then it took on...

Writing starts with living.

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Indentations on the page, words, my friends, and I will share them with you.

When the work is the best work, it’s more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down.

We can’t choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones — but we can choose how to come to terms with them.

Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.

We all have different voices for different occasions. I just turn those voices into characters and put them in my books.

The night before a deadline, I usually am in desperate need of a back rub. And new wrists. And candy. And little mice to secretly finish the job while I am sleeping.

There is nothing more valuable in the writing process than a friend to hold you accountable to your own potential.

Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro,...

If writing didn’t require thinking then we’d all be doing it.

Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas’s house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless — as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in...

The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody...

Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn’t necessary in a long-term relationship. Just as the first caress can lead to a change of...

…when you’re a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself…

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne’s vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn’t care about masterpieces, or even good paintings…...

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is...

you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation...

Rules such as ‘Write what you know,’ and ‘Show, don’t tell,’ while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in...

What really matters is:—1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.2. Always prefer the plain direct word to...

Briefer is better, so learn to write tight

problems” with writing are just puzzles, and they can be interesting to try to crack, even when it’s frustrating.

Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.

On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.

I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the...

can you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls?

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn’t, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that...

Writers need faith, or else we can never trust the action of our words!

..here’s the editor’s prescription, writer: 1000 words daily until next checkup.

There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.” Professor Piper

If you don’t make time for writing, writing won’t make time for you.

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was...

Art is the overflow of emotion into action.

Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.

Menulis fiksi adalah menuangkan perasaan dan semangat hidup dalam untaian kata-kata di atas kertas-sebuah usaha tanpa akhir untuk mendapatkan makna-makna yang berbeda

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would...

The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and...

The writer,’ said Donald Barthelme, ‘is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.’ In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in...

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.’ And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. …...

The best stories come from deep within us and are of us. Either our inner child comes out to play and makes all things possible, or we mold our characters and events from our own...

Stories are invented as you go along…