1,024 Quotes About Writing-process

So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

If we eliminate the word "writer", if we just go back to writing as an act of listening and naming what we hear, some of the rules dissappear. There is an organic shape, a form-coming-into-form that is inherent in the thing we are observing, listening to, and trying to put on the page. It has rules of its own that it will reveal to us if we listen with attention. Shape does not need to be imposed. Shape is a part of what we are listening to. When we just let ourselves write, we get it "right".

With poetry and writing, the question isn’t “do you know the right words?”.The real question is, “can you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls?

How do you write about what can’t be written about? I try to bend language until it can suggest the ineffable, the great gap between what we think we know, and what we don’t know. The felt but not expressed. The intuited but not understood.

...a thriller's toughest trick: carefully assembling everything we think we know, until it reveals the one thing we didn't see coming.

...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself...

...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

Dialogues must appear as natural as if coming from effortless writing. It must not sweat. Your beloved readers must not sweat. But here am I, literally sweating, because my characters are literally talking dirty in a steamy sweaty and bloody scene.

Deadlines are a great antidote to insecurity.