What is so frightening about [writing]? I still don't know. Perhaps it's the horrible knowledge that no matter how well you write, the resultant product will never correlate exactly to the truth, will...
I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will lear...
There is nothing more valuable in the writing process than a friend to hold you accountable to your own potential.
Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely goo...
Stories aren't made of language: they're made of something else. A little earlier I said that stories were about life; perhaps they're made of life.
Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
. . . But then you will want to put that {publication} behind you right away. You will want to recover the obscurity you swim best through. You've got eternal youth there. You'll never be satisfied. I...
Getting started on writing a book isn't as hard as it sounds. You don't need a plan and an outline. In fact, all you need are two things: time and one idea.
The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.
Hypocrisy is our friend. Power structures have to pretend to hold values in order to win the loyalty of at least some of society. We can use the gap between those professed values and reality to move...
People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, comp...
Problem, purpose, conflict, goal. Use them. Think about them while you are in the planning phase of your novel; keep these elements at the back of your mind to guide you while you write. When you have...
...a writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.
Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily...
...and above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. T...
Ultimately, then, creativity and originality lie not in the avoidance of established forms but in the imaginative use of them.
Make it so good and so clear that it doesn't need any further explanation.
Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.
I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvi...