think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to f...
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to writ...
Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.
I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or...
Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring s...
A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.
Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.
You don't teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.
Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.
For most of the process, nothing but faith, fueled by your own stubbornness, will be pulling you along. The work that you've done on the book so far won't be much comfort, because so much of it will b...
Only my characters truly know what's happening - I just hold the pen
You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.
On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.
I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious. Non-fiction uses the medium of...
At it's best,the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then - and only the...
There are students that are scattered, who need to see something through to the finish, but I would say there are possibly more who do not entertain the leaps of the mind that need to be nurtured, and...
The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.
Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as...
A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.
Do not worry about what words to use. Worry about why this story needs to be told and the rest will take care of itself.