You are not an "author," you are a writer. If your books are still selling like hotcakes ten years after your demise, THEN you're an author.
Find the problem, find the story.
During 30 years of earning my daily bread as a writer I have learned many lessons about our craft. The most significant of those lessons is that I still have many lessons to learn about out craft.
However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist...
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
Telling a story is like playing a fiddle. No one want's to hear it when it's done badly
Writing is a team sport.
Each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... (Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read)
All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully an...
Allen Ginsberg instructs: First thought, best thought. Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, 'First though...
As a naturally shy person, I loved the anonymity of writing before my career took off. I loved how my stories didn't care about my weight. When I started publishing that writing, I loved that, to my r...
Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you wa...
Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page clo...
Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.
I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.
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...
In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.
It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energ...
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