Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.
I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!
Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created becaus...
As a writer: Aim toward becoming keen through a looking glass limn perspective on evoking pleasure of the senses with STRONG VERBS.
You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.
Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.
I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack
He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these a...
Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book. What yo...
Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact...
The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I ha...
A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.
For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since...
Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.
Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.
People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.
People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.
I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought...
Open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day.
Showing 21 to 40 of 211 results