Rule #1: Writing is for the creative brain. Editing is for the critical brain. Separate them appropriately.
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water.
Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.
If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried ali...
Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and friends...
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.
If you want to be a writer, you have to keep writing, all the time, and when you're not writing, be thinking about and planning writing.
What you don't write is often more important than what you do
If you wanna be a writer, you must learn to paint a picture with words.
People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.
It's okay to write crap. Just don't try publishing it while it's still crap.
Heinlein's Rules for Writers Rule One: You Must WriteRule Two: Finish What Your StartRule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial OrderRule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Mar...
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...
Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Rom...
You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. Th...
Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
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...
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...