quote:There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. W. Somerset Maugham
Posted by Smaug (Member # 2807) on :
quote:Practice, practice, practice writing. Writing is a craft that requires both talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong. -Jeffrey A. Carver
quote:Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. -E. L. Doctorow
quote:You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club. -Jack London
Posted by LDWriter2 (Member # 9148) on :
quote: "Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!" ~Henry David Thoreau
quote: Elmore Leonard's maxim: leave out the parts people skip.
quote: 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. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
William Strunk Jr.
One for the writer's friends
quote:"Never insult a writer. You may wind up being immortalized in ways you may not appreciate." Garrison Keillor.
Posted by Merlion-Emrys (Member # 7912) on :
I quite like that first one, Meredith. Sounds like something a Jim Henson character would say.
Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :
"You want to write a story, see, and you sit down in front of the mill, wait until that certain feeling comes to you, hold off a second more, just to be quite sure that you know exactly what you want to do, take a deep breath, and get up and make a pot of coffee.
"This sort of thing is likely to go on for days, until you are out of coffee, and can't get more until you pay for same, which you can do by writing a story and selling it; or until you get tired of messing around and sit down and write a yarn purely by means of knowing how to do it and applying the knowledge."
---Theodore Sturgeon
Posted by EVOC (Member # 9381) on :
quote:Originally posted by Meredith: WordPress threw this one up when I posted today:
quote:There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. W. Somerset Maugham
I got that one too and I loved it.
Posted by EVOC (Member # 9381) on :
quote:Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things. - Ray Bradbury
quote:Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. Isaac Asimov
Posted by InarticulateBabbler (Member # 4849) on :
quote:In a [short] story, you learn about the characters from what they do; in a novel it is the other way around: you have your characters and then they do something idiosyncratic, emanation from their unique natures.