73 Quotes About How-to-write

Readers can only read so many books in a month. And unless you give them a really good reason to read your book, they'll prefer to read some other, more famous book. You're competing for the reader's attention. And if you don't even know that, you've already lost.

When you self-publish a book, not only are you competing with millions of other books, you're also at a disadvantage because your book is self-published, and a lot of readers are unwilling to even try your book, because they've had so many bad experiences.

Before you take anyone's advice, check the sales rank of their own books. If their Amazon sales rank is somewhere around 700,000 or worse, they're barely selling one book per month, if even that. Why would you follow their advice? They have no idea what they're talking about. They're rookies pretending to be experts. It's almost like they're role playing. They're make-believe writers, the way kids are make-believe astronauts or pirates.

Its pretty annoying to real writers, when some unqualified, talent-free hack calls himself a writer, because it devalues the word. Millions of shitty self-published wannabe writers are giving real indie writers with real talent a bad name.

If everyone is suddenly a writer, then no one is. It feels like cultural appropriation. You're stealing their identity. You're appropriating the one thing that is sacred to real writers. You're not a writer. You like to write. There's a difference. To you it's just a hobby, and yet you decorate yourself with stolen feathers. You give yourself a title you haven't earned and don't deserve. Just like you can't wake up one day and pretend now you're a proctologist.

Most wannabe writers are to the book industry what cows are to the meat industry.

The fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole.

The piano is kind of like a dance floor for our thoughts you know? A very woody foundation so that we can really focus on the poetry.

Every writer should know their target. Aim for the heart ~ hit that and all which follows is sheer ecstasy.