Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not...
I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. Th...
I would write:The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam.Or:The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream.The ol...
If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the e...
If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way. I've seen beginning writers pepper curse words through sentence after sentence.'If you don't -blanking- get your...
It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole. You don't have to move in with your parents and collect an allowance, but you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. C...
Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.
Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. Good for you, he said without looking up. Start the next one today.
On Hayao MiyazakiI told Miyazaki I love the gratuitous motion in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or lo...
One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.
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...
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends. He stared at the paintings for a long time and t...
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at...
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.
The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.
The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his le...
The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one's curiosity to interface with more and more histor...
There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our fa...
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