Writer’s Block and Hard Work

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin–the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start. – Robert Harris

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty. – George Singleton

Keep at it! The one talent that’s indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. – Tom Clancy

You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block. – John Rogers

Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise. – Jane Yolen

Best advice on writing I’ve ever received. Finish. – Peter Mayle

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail. – Ernest Hemingway

I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning. – Peter De Vries

The Writer’s Voice

Ultimately, voice is the writer’s personal style coming through in the writing. It’s as complex and varied as human personality itself. – Jack Hart

Style is nothing but the mere silhouette of thought; and an obscure or bad style means a dull and confused brain. – Arthur Shopenhauer.

People often lack any voice at all in their writing because they stop so often in the act of writing a sentence and worry and change their minds about which words to use. They have none of the natural breath in their writing that they have in their speaking. – Peter Elbow

When we encounter a natural style, we are astonished and delighted; for we expected to see an author, and we find a man. – Blaise Pascal

You have style and a voice already. They abide in you as parts of your individuality. You would never ask, “How can I learn to talk?” You know that you already have your own favorite words, your own characteristic turns of phrase, your own meter and rhythm. – Samuel G. Freedman

The closer you can get your writing voice to the way you speak, the more lively, powerful, and engaging your writing will be. – Richard Andersen, Helene Hinis

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, the reader should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. – Meg Rosoff

We’re always being told “find your voice.” When I was younger, I never really knew what this meant. I used to worry a lot about voice, wondering if I had my own. But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow. – Austin Kleon

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo speech you heard when a child. – Kurt Vonnegut

We speak in simple, clear, easy-to-understand sentences. When we write like we speak, our messages are simple, clear, and easy to understand. – Richard Andersen, Helene Hinis

To communicate effectively, you have to develop the courage to be yourself, to put yourself on the line, to write as closely as possible to the way you speak. – Richard Andersen

Music and Rhythm in Writing

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart. – Terry Brooks

I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. – John Steinbeck

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. – Elmore Leonard

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work. – Robert Frost

I could tell you which writer’s rhythms I am imitating. It’s not exactly plagiarism, it’s falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it. – Charles Kuralt

In a really good writer every sentence is rhythmical, while bad writers perpetually offend or puzzle [the ear]. – Henry Watson Fowler

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them. – E. L. Doctorow

The writer controls the pace for the reader, slow or fast or in between, and uses sentences of different lengths to create music, the rhythm of the story. – Roy Peter Clark

To write is to create music. The words you write make sounds, and when those sounds are in harmony, the writing will work.

So think of your writing as music. Your story might sound like the “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2,” or it might sound like “Satisfaction.” You decide. But give it unity. It should not sound like a musical battle between the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra and the Rolling Stones.

Read aloud what you write and listen to its music. Listen for dissonance. Listen for the beat. Listen for the gaps where the music leaps from sound to sound instead of following as it should. Listen for sour notes. Is this word a little sharp, is that one a little bit flat? Listen for instruments that don’t blend well. Is there an electric guitar shrieking among the whispers of flutes and violins? Imagine the sound of each word as an object falling into the eardrum. Does it make a soft landing sound like the word ripple, or does it land hard and dig in like the word inexorable? Does it cut off all sound for an instant, like the word brutal, or does it massage the reader’s ear, like melodious?

There are no good sounds or bad sounds, just as there are no good notes or bad notes in music. It is the way in which you combine them that can make the writing succeed or fail. It’s the music that matters. – Gary Provost

Writing is not a visual art any more than composing music is a visual art. The sound of a word is at least as important as the meaning. – Jack Prelutsky (Note: Mr. Prelutsky writes children’s poetry. Obviously, his second sentence does not apply to all types of writing, especially scientific or technical writing.)

Hear me now or regret it later: Everything you write must be read aloud. Once all the context items are in place, this is the final test for any written piece . . . Do not neglect your sense of hearing in the process of writing and reading. As a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, I can tell you on good authority that you have been listening to the English language at least five or six years longer than you have been writing and reading. And, most probably, your ears also had eighteen or more years of familiarity with the language before you began to read or write with a writer’s sensibility. For these reasons, your ears know when things sound okay, good, beautiful, strange, awkward, or just plain bad, before your eye can pick up on such things . . . Your written voice should burn with the fire of fervent prayer, soothe like a friend’s voice during a late-night phone call, allure like a lover’s whisper. You must, through your accessible, infinitely read-aloudable voice, make your audience into an insatiable reader of your words. – Jiro Adachi

 convinced that there is only one specific, consistently reliable tip writers in training can be given: read your stuff aloud, if not literally, then with an inner voice attended to by the inner ear. It is the only sure way to spot the clinkers, the rum rhythms. The merit and effectiveness of the practice stems from this link between the written and the spoken word. – Ben Yagoda

I’m very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it . . . Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment. – Elmore Leonard

Writers

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. – Anne Frank

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow. – Margaret Atwood

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. – Isaac Asimov

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a “capacity for clear thought,” able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They’re geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How. – James J. Kilpatrick

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight. – Edna Ferber (Note: Ms. Ferber is, of course, correct. This is why I decided not to put my picture on my books’ covers. My editor agrees this was a good decision.)

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. – Olin Miller

Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals. – John Steinbeck

Whenever there’s something wrong with your writing, suspect that there’s something wrong with your thinking. – Patricia T. O’Conner

You know, it’s a funny thing about writers. Most people don’t stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago—they don’t expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way. – Cornelia Funke

Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen. – Katrina Monroe

The best fame is a writer’s fame. It’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat. – Fran Lebowitz

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. – Richard Bach

If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be. – Theodora Goss

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all. – E. B. White

I think a lot of young aspiring writers get misdirected; they think “I ought to write this, even though I enjoy reading that.” What you have to do is write what you enjoy reading. – Jeffery Deaver

Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing— a sunset or an old shoe— in absolute and simple amazement. – Raymond Carver

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself. – Anne Rice

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. – Susan Sontag

If you’re a writer, write. And always strive for excellence. – Linda Yezak

I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire. – Gordon Lish

If you’re a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he’s good, the older he gets, the better he writes. – Mickey Spillane

The Writing Process

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. – Stephen Fry

Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation. – Laurence Sterne

One should use common words to say uncommon things. – Arthur Schopenhauer

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack. – Winston Churchill

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. – Isaac Asimov

You know when you think about writing a book, you think it is overwhelming. But, actually, you break it down into tiny little tasks any moron can do. – Annie Dillard

It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn’t inhibit the creative flow. – Michael Morpurgo

Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it. – Jean Paul Richter

I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles. – Shannon Hale

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you’ll do yourself a service. – Stephen Sondheim

Editing

With writing, we have second chances. – Jonathan Safran Foer

The first draft is just a skeleton—just bare bones. It’s like the very first rehearsal of a play, where the director moves the actors around mechanically to get a feel of the action. – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work. – Ernest Hemingway

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. – Arthur Polotnik

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional equity in our first draft; we can’t believe that it wasn’t born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn’t. – William Zinsser

Good writers learn to switch back and forth between the close-up writer and the slightly distant editor as often as is needed to improve the work. With practice, this knack gets stronger, and as you learn about the kinds of mistakes writers tend to make habitually and how to spot them in your own writing, you’ll get better at this every time you do it. – Bridget McKenna

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things that people do. – William Zinsser

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I’m greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed. – J. K. Galbraith

I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me. – Jeanne Voelker

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you’re certain it’s as good as your finite powers can enable it to be. – Rose Tremain

The most obvious—and easiest!—way to gain perspective is to put your work away for a while. The truth is, we don’t know how taking a break frees up the mind, but it does: Somehow it freshens our little neurons, or perhaps it prompts the brain to create more cleverness molecules. If you can bear to let a short piece sit a week and a book-length work a month, do so. Longer is fine, too; some authors have abandoned manuscripts for years before unearthing them and realizing, “Hey, this isn’t bad,” and renewing their energy for the project. – Elizabeth Sims

It’s an adrenaline surge rushing through your body. You have this spark of an idea that keeps threatening to burst into flames and you have to get the words out on paper to match this emotion or picture in your head. After this comes the work of cleaning up the mess that you made. – Janet West

Writing is rewriting. Even after you’ve gotten an agent and an editor, you’ll have to rewrite. If you fall in love with the vision you want of your work and not your words, the rewriting will become easier. – Nora DeLoach

Proofread out loud. When we proofread, we tend to rely almost exclusively on our eyes. Few of us realize that our ears are also reliable editors. Read out loud what you have written; listen to the way it sounds. If it does not sound the way you sound when you speak, change it. The closer you can bring your written prose to your speaking prose, the more authentic and less artificial it will be. Proofreading out loud, as students in the City University of New York writing centers have discovered, automatically eliminates 60 percent of your grammatical errors. – Richard Andersen

Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity . . . edit one more time! – C. K. Webb

Simplicity, Brevity

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself . . . Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. – Mark Twain

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. – Albert Einstein

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. – Ernest Hemingway

Write telegrams, not essays. – Lawrence Creaghan

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. – William Strunk, Jr.

Strike every third word on principle alone. – Mark Twain

SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you’ll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: “Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or ‘crying,’ behavior forms.” If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant. – Dave Barry

Good Writing

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them. – George Orwell

On the Writing Process: When in doubt, take it out. – Barbara DaCosta

The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought. – Nathaniel Hawthorne

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. – W. Somerset Maugham

People who write well do well. – Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson

To write well, one must utterly abandon oneself to it. You cannot keep secrets or hold anything back. You must spill your heart out on paper. – Carla Iacovetti

The Fun Side

I decided to write short stories because they got rejected quicker. – Caroline B. Cooney

The funny thing about writing is that whether you’re doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That’s actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing. – John Green

Make notes—I’ve lost more material than I’ve ever written. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not still up there in one’s brain. It’s in outer space and it ain’t coming back. – Judith Guest

I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me. – Matt Groening

The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so. – William Targ

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. –Norman Mailer

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. – Robert Benchley

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. – Douglas Ada

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book. – Ernest Hemingway

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done. – Steven Wright

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose. – P. G. Wodehouse

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography. – Steven Wright

Remember, double negatives are a complete no-no. – Anonymous

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. – T. S. Eliot

I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out. – Oscar Wilde

I always put the apostrophe in ain’t to make certain I’m using proper improper English. – Author Unknown

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay. – Christopher Hitchens

As far as I’m concerned, “whom” is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler. – Calvin Trillin

Writing is a fairly lonely business unless you invite people in to watch you do it, which is often distracting and then you have to ask them to leave. – Marc Lawrence

Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters. – A. Lee Martinez

I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has. That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner. – Jarod Kintz

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it. –­ H. G. Wells

The pen is mightier than the sword unless it’s a real sword in which case the guy with the pen should run away fast. – Roger Eschbacher

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. – Samuel Johnson

Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called. – Jarod Kintz

I’m trying to translate what my cat says and put it in a book, but how many homonyms are there for meow? – Jarod Kintz

The cure for writer’s cramp is writer’s block. – Inigo de Leon

If my name were Mark Twain, I’d write under the pseudonym “Samuel Clemens.” – Jarod Kintz

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. – An unnamed English professor at Ohio University

I write to find out what I’m talking about. – Edward Albee

I sat down and tried to write a story.

Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight.

That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn’t think of the next one. After cleaning my room three times, I decided to leave Ian alone for a while because I was starting to get mad at him. – Stephen Chbosky

If the English Language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers. – Doug Larson

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. – Winston Churchill

Miscellaneous

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. – James Michener

To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man. – Aristotle

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip. – Elmore Leonard

If you are ever completely satisfied with something you have written, you are setting your sights too low. But if you can’t let go of your material even after you have done the best that you can with it, you are setting your sights too high. – Terry Brooks

Even if you never get published, no one can take away your joy in writing, which is why you should be doing it anyway. – Jennifer DeChiara

Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer. – Y. S. Lee

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from. – Gene Fowler

Be passionate about what you write, believe in your ability to convey timeless ideas, and let no one tell you what you’re capable of. – Christina Westover

Writing is like baking cupcakes, you’re trying to make something from the raw. Like with cupcakes its flour and eggs and stuff, and with books its ideas and words. The end result is the same though, you want people to eat them up. – Emma Shortt

It’s as hard to get from almost finished to finished as to get from beginning to almost done. – Elinor Fuchs

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water. – Mark Twain

Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. – John Updike

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators. – Stephen Fry

By the end of the writing process, which is about 80 songs per album, I look at the material and think, what’s going to make a difference in someone’s life. – Jason Mraz

Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it. – J. D. Salinger

When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble. – Charles Bukowski

It’s not getting it perfect. This is taking an infinite project and turning it into a finite project. It’s about realizing it isn’t your absolute best work—because then you’d never let go of it—but it’s something you’d be very proud of. – Dave Cullen

The problem is to teach ourselves to think, and the writing will take care of itself. – Christopher Morley

The best children’s book writers are not people who have kids, but people who write from the child within themselves. – Andrea Brown

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better. – T. S. Eliot

I write for the kid in me . . . Often when I’m working on a story, I’ll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they’ve taken the story. It’s as if they have a life all their own. What I do is create them and then let them go on to entertain me. –Elvira Woodruff

Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page. When people tell me I’ve kept them up all night, I feel like I’ve succeeded. – Sidney Sheldon

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author? – Philip Gilbert Hamerton

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. – Robert Frost

When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism. But when you take it from many writers, it’s research. – William Mizner

You should write like you talk. It’s the language you’ve used all your life. Our friends have never had a problem understanding us. – Ian Stables

Pages and pages and pages with words all over the pages. My goodness, what fun. What fun to write whatever words occur. – Jonah Winter

Write while the heat is in you. – Henry David Thoreau

In 1988 I wrote a baseball book called Spring Training. It combined my lifelong vocation with my lifelong addiction—which is one of the best things that can happen to a writer; people will write better and with more enjoyment if they write about what they care about. – William Zinsser

Writing is a delicious agony. – Gwendolyn Brooks

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it. – Toni Morrison

The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing. – Mignon McLaughlin

So many words, so little time. ­– S. Kelley Harrell

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say. – Beryl Bainbridge

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it. – Toni Morrison

Good writers are visible just behind their words. – William Zinsser

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. – Ernest Hemingway

Put some fire in your document or put your document in the fire. – Maxwell Friend (paraphrased)

Write the best book you possibly can, then dedicate yourself to getting people to read it. – J. A. Konrath

Write what you know. – Mark Twain

Don’t write what you know. Write what you love. That’s what will keep you writing. – C. C. Humphreys

Think of the best teachers you have known. Did any of them not use humor? – Stephen Wilbers

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. – Abraham Lincoln

Write what you want to read. The person you know best in this world is you. Listen to yourself. If you are excited by what you are writing, you have a much better chance of putting that excitement over to a reader. – Robin McKinley

The golden rule of writing is to write what you care about. If you care about your topic, you’ll do your best writing, and then you stand the best chance of really touching a reader in some way. – Jerry Spinelli

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. – Saul Bellow

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke. – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Candidate for a Pullet Surprise

I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it’s weigh.
My checker tolled me sew.

– Mark Eckman and Jerrold H. Zar

When I asked an agent recently how she decided whether or not to take on a manuscript, she told me she asked for the first fifty pages and read the first sentence. If she liked the first sentence, she read the second. If she liked that one, she read the third, and so on. If she reached the end of the first fifty pages without putting the manuscript down, she signed it up.

 Granted, most readers are willing to read your second sentence even if the first one isn’t brilliant, but the agent’s answer shows the importance of “hook.” If you don’t grab your readers within, say, your first fifty pages, you won’t have them at all. – David King

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: “Avoid them like the plague.” Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they’re dead-on. – Khaled Hosseini

Do not attempt to analyze or perfect your words while you are getting them down in the first draft. Write as fast as you are able, letting spontaneity take over. The time to criticize and take apart comes later— when the work is inescapably on paper. – Lee Wyndham

I think to be oversensitive about clichés is like being oversensitive about table manners. – Evelyn Waugh

In conversation the perfect word is not always there. In writing we can try out fifteen different words before we are satisfied.

In conversation we spread our thoughts thin. In writing we can compress.

So strive to make your writing sound like a conversation, but don’t make it an ordinary conversation. Make it a good one. – Gary Provost

What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don’t seem to accomplish anything—just a few pages, most of which don’t seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I’m very proud. – Louis Sachar

Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, “Hi. Thanks for writing me!” – Alvi Syahrin

The separation is in the preparation. – Harrison Wilson III

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. – Ben H. Winters

It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. – Ernest Hemingway

I’d like to treat you to my favorite writing quotes. These quotes are from the world’s best writers, and they in themselves are a writing education.

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