426 Quotes About Writing-craft

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited

The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.

Suspense doesn’t always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story.

Delayed gratification hints that something terrible is going to happen, and then delays the resolution. It’s that interval between the promise of something awful and it actually happening, where suspense resides.

There is a story within all of us that we want to tell one day.

We writers write stories on the people we come across in life. We meet many people and each person leaves behind a part of himself or herself with us. And then one day the writer's life becomes a story!

There's nothing better than starting with a blank page and creating something that others can enjoy and get invested in.