Cliches are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.
Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.
Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.
Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.
A writer can do without food for a few hours, but not without the sight of books.
As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a lesser number of words.
Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.
Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.
Tell a story in lesser and simpler words.
A writer gets to live yet another life every time she creates a new story.
I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you...
Unfortunately, to try to disconnect faith from vision is to do violence to the whole personality, and the whole personality participates in the act of writing. The tensions of being a Catholic novelis...
The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.
If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.
It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.
The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let th...
My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to do.
It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the superna...
If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.