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....

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

… my early writing was a silent fury – at what or whom, I had no idea – but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I’ve let it out…

We live in a society that doesn’t offer any support or appreciation for ventures that aren’t clearly articulated and aligned for a goal. A writer gets past this. It’s going to be a mess before...

Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that’s too much pressure and you’ll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.

Sometimes a fresh perspective is all you need to get a second wind on the revision process. Try viewing your material on a different medium; it will shed a new light on the inconsistencies in...

Let your characters lead when you’re dancing together.

All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.

People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and...

I just slept for fifteen hours straight. Yes, writing a musical is THAT exhausting!

Still writing?” I usually nod and smile, then quickly change the subject. But here is what I would like to put down my fork and say: Yes, yes, I am. I will write until the...

A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you’re not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that’s my time, 1 or...

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at...

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.