885 Quotes About Writing-advice

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material…..

If you have a machine with three or four parts, you can shake them up in a box and it's still pretty clear what's there. If you have a machine with 10,000 parts and you shake them up in a box, what you have is a box of junk.

Trust your instincts. Do not confuse ego with instinct. Ego has to be set aside if you want to improve, and we should always want to improve. There is no glass ceiling on being better.

We should be told: Write fast, write close to the bone, write for ten hours straight until you’re not thinking in words anymore, but in colors, in smells, in waves of memory. Right what you care about. Don’t write one more word you don’t care about. Don’t waste any more of your life on what does not matter to you. Write only what matters to you—those scenes, those dialogues. Get messy. Before you get neat, get very, very messy. Write until you are more alive than you have ever been before.

Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.

We don’t read to observe the character from a distance. We read to become the character and experience the conflicts and rewards they are experiencing.

While the goal of a book is to create a positive emotional experience for the reader, the goal of the opening is to set the stage, to pull the reader in.

If you can master the opening, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

I don’t get writer's block because I don’t believe in it. I believe you sit in front of the computer and force your fingers to get something on the screen.