Writing Quotes
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God calls me to write the truth of my life transparently so that others can learn from my hurt and heartache without taking the field trip themselves.
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The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come.
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I have the strangest thoughts in my head, maybe I should not write them down.
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The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can't, you're dead.
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The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.
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I want to stay in the writing long enough to become a falling star of the up-and-coming genre, then a has-been known only by collectors, and finally a rediscovered artist who is finally recognized as a creative giant misunderstood in his own time. Then forgotten again. But if I get removed from the list, it'll probably be because there are just too many damn good writers out there, and any poll of some assortment of editors is going to come up with an equally valid, equally varied list.
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If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?
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The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you'll need later.
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More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief's inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning.
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One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
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I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.
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Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
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Sometimes when I'm writing a superhero story I wonder if they really have to punch each other in the face. Is that really going to solve anything? I feel the same way sometimes when I watch episodes of Law & Order. I'm like, "Yeah, right. You found the sex offender and now everything is fine." TV is big on closure, but I think closure is horseshit in real life. I'm still haunted by stuff I did in my teen years when I think about it too much.
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There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.
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One of the easiest things in the world is not to write... If it were easy, everyone would do it.
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Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.
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No doubt, there are those who believe that judges - and particularly dissenting judges - write to hear themselves say, as it were, 'I, I, I.' And no doubt, there are also those who believe that judges are, like Joan Didion, primarily engaged in the writing of fiction. I cannot agree with either of those propositions.
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I'd love to write full time. But it's not something that is due to me because I'm a writer. Times are very hard for doing the thing you love, but the payoff for not having much money is that you love your job. A balance would be good. But yes, given infinite funds, or a guaranteed regular income of some kind, I'd happily shut myself away and write stories for the rest of what I've got in me.
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Whenever a songwriter writes a big hit, then the next 20 songs they write - no matter how bad they are - get recorded.
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I think people assume that women write about the domestic sphere. Women write about relationships and family. Men do, too, but then it's the Great American Novel.
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Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story.
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My writing has always been considered extremely important, even though I make slim-to-no money at it.
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I'm a big fan of things in writing in general that are subtle, that suggest something without actually in-your-face saying it.
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I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.
