writing

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream."

"When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can."

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."

"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."

"a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in."

"The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out."

"Sometimes the most beautiful people are beautifully broken."

"To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue."

"You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me."

"Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him."Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded."

"Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot."

"At the end of the day I went to this place where your memories left footsteps on my skin and the breath of your touch stained my desire. Yea, it was one of those nights where I needed you the most."

"Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole."

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."

"I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh."

"You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism."

"The thing I write will be the thing I write."

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."