307 Quotes About Creative-writing

Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

In the Alco Ward a dispute had broken out over plagiarism. Incidentally, when I arrived there for the first time I did not have the slightest notion that I was crossing the threshold of a creative writing program, that I was entering a community of people of the pen, of writers who were incessantly creating their alcoholic autobiographies, recording their innermost feeling in cheap sixty-page notebooks that were called emotional journals, laboriously assembling their drunkard's confessions.

If, while writing your novel, it starts "speaking" to you, don't answer back, keep it talking.

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.”[Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

A lot of novelists start late—Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

You can't write like everybody so write like yourself.

I find it helpful when I stop for the day to leave the last sentence unfinished or the last paragraph only lightly sketched out, so that when I start again I can pick up where I left off the day before.