885 Quotes About Writing-advice

Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.

Always remember that your memoir is never about you. It's about your reader. At it's core, it's about that shared space where we all experience the timeless truths of what it means to be human.

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.

At the beginning, you need no support other than your pen and paper to write down the ideas that your brain is ready to supply you at any given time.

Publish. Be damned. Repeat.

The only cure for not being able to write is to write.

Should an unpublished writer spend money for an editor? I did my own due diligence and searched for ones that edited many books in my genre (found one through my writers group), and paid each one handsomely. It was well worth it. Got me traditionally published, each time.