426 Quotes About Writing-craft

I'm just going wherever the brainstorm takes me.

Fiction can accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot

Every novel is about salvation, says Bela Hamvas, there is no novel without confession.

Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match....One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.

Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.

I have this idea that writing is all about divergent thinking colliding with a hurricane of emotions.

The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination

At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her.Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse's power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.

For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.