Books have a life. They breathe. When you write a book, it grows and changes. You learn from your characters after you create them. They come from you and you become them.

Writing is like a religion to those who don’t practise, an act of faith for those who do.

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

Enmerson’s interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a...

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

Doing nothing can be as rewarding as doing something. And doing very little can be as productive, in a creative sense, as doing a lot.

Plot comes from the mind but the characters come from the heart!

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

When I’m writing I don’t want anyone else in the room – including myself.

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...

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

Every writer should know their target. Aim for the heart ~ hit that and all which follows is sheer ecstasy.

Fiction though it is a fiction, should be written in a way that it feels like a reality, a reality every reader willingly or sometimes unwillingly goes through, until the reader finishes reading and sometimes...

To prepare to write, I don’t surround myself with books. I surround myself with feelings.

You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit...

Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.

My best writing happens when I’m fighting to produce it.

Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so...

When a person sets out to learn from others and not to teach others he becomes a true writer.

Your experiences are the foundation for your story; your imagination takes it from there.

The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.

If I don’t stay in and write, I feel like a prisoner.

Make it unique and make it shine.

Subtlety is the mark of confidence and is thus by far the hardest thing for a writer to achieve.

The only difference between writers and people who don’t write is that writers aren’t afraid to display their demons.

Introduction of deus ex machina is a tell-tale sign of sloppy plotting.

The Bible should be taught in schools – in English, with all the other fiction.

When one sense is diminished, the others burn more brightly. In a blindfold, you feel every minute motion of his hand as it crosses your body, his fingertips finding secret places, his palm on bare...

Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: “At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You’d be surprised how effective it can be.

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

We need to boost each other to get to the top. It is much more effective than stepping on each other.

If the voice inside your head doesn’t sound anything like you, you might be a writer.