If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will.
Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.
Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the ot...
A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.
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.
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...
Art consist of a writer or painter’s psychosis extirpated on the canvas of his choosing, a truism whether one is inspecting a Vincent Van Gogh masterpiece or deciphering the incomprehensible utterings...
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...
Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.
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...
Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear langua...
Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was...
How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the I that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
I don't know which is worse—to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there,...
I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you're trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to com. T...
I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at...
I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote Ethan Frome that I suddenly felt the artisan's f...
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