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...
Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.
There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.
The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.
If you can't give the is-ness of a thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. If often works.
Work on your craft, whatever your medium. Determination is your illusion headway toward reality.
Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.
Life is a book. There are many pages to be written.
Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.
It's better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.
If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.
Language is a tool for communicating and not a barrier to writing
Writing is not a hobby. It's the only way I get to shut up the demons in my head.
Write at the edges of the day.
Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.
You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.
Writer's Block: making authors miserable since the Stone Age.
Toni Morrison said, The function of freedom is to free someone else, and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyo...
YA doesn't get librarians fired!
When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.