Don’t over edit. Don’t second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don’t get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of...

I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex.” – 1946

The best thing that can happen to me when I’m writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I’m writing at all. It’s as though I enter into a kind of trance. I...

self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect...

Start with a word. A word leads to a sentence, which leads to a paragraph, which leads to a chapter, which leads to a manuscript, which leads to a book….. just start with a word!

Writing is like daydreaming through your fingers.

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

Have you ever pondered the miracle of popcorn? It starts out as a tiny, little, compact kernel with magic trapped inside that when agitated, bursts to create something marvelously desirable. It’s sort of like those...

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded...

Of course, the writer can impose control; It’s just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however… that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is...

I’m sorry if…I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you’re trapped in...

I had found by experience that putting things down on paper helped to clear the mind in precisely the same way, as Mrs. Mullet had taught me, that an eggshell clarifies the consommé or the...

It’s better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.

I wish my brain had an off switch. Maybe that way I could get some sleep.

I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.

Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then...

On some days, writing is wonderful. On the days when it is wonderful, it feels like you are the God of a universe that the rest of the world is not yet privy to. And...

If your screen stays blank or your notepad empty, God cannot use your words.

It’s a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn’t even know you were aiming for.

…consider yourself a functional character in someone else’s novel – a background character – a person on the street – that’s the perspective …

I’m writing a book. I’m almost finished. I numbered the pages. Now all I have to do is fill them in.

To find the courage to keep writing after constant failure is awesomeness. Winning is eminent.

If you have a story inside you but don’t know where to start, look within and write from the heart, for the heart will never steer you wrong.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

I wrote the last sentence of The Patron Saint of Liars in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in...

When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You’ll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any...

Don’t give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn’t what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what’s on the...

A writer writes. There are no exceptions to this reality. No excuses. Stop wasting time talking about your stories and get them on paper.

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.

Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe: 1. Write a simple narrative. 2. Make a long list. 3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

Every writer or wanna-be writer has ideas for books. The problem isn’t finding an idea, it’s choosing one

He cut away the insignificant and incidental. Those bits were tossedaway from the juicy core pieces. He slid the excess tissue and tendons away and reorganized the good bits on his plate. Those pieces were...

All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the...

When we sit down to write, we psychically enter a sanctuary. This safe haven is our own personal space where we can say whatever is on our mind, where we can talk about what matters...

A writer will always be a writer. It’s not a choice, it’s a destiny.

The effect your readers want is for what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what’s happening in the story. They don’t want approximations, they don’t want a report,...

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device – a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle,...

The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought–while his hand moved rapidly–what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who...

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...

Read…

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.