If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can't make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more. One other...
Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of...
I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good w...
There's no right way of writing. There's only your way.
You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit o...
A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it...
An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.
Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.
Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I h...
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even...
I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.
I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.
When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.
Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
I recommend writing standing up from time to time. It's easier to dance when you finish writing.
All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten fe...
I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.
Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?
Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir yo...