#writing-process

"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy."

"I hate writing, I love having written."

"I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM."

"You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence."

"I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?"I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations."

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

"Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done."

"Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right."

"Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them."

"New Year - a new chapter, new verse, or just the same old story ? Ultimately we write it. The choice is ours."

"Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion."

"Writing is the thing that props me up."

"No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it"

"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."