Rob Bignell's Blog, page 10

Great Writing Quotes by Author Nora Roberts

A writer never finds the time to write. A writer makes it. If you don���t have the drive, the discipline, and the desire, then you can have all the talent in the world, and you aren���t going to finish a book.

I think I do have some advantages, not in storytelling, but that I was educated by the nuns. That means I was [raised] with discipline and guilt���they���re very wonderful writer���s tools. 

You can fix anything but a blank page.

All my books are character driven. Character is key. Character is plot���character is everything and the story wraps around them. 

Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.

My only job is to tell the story. I think that if more writers focused on that, they���d be better off and probably more successful. 

You have to have the discipline to sit down and tell the story, and the desire to tell a good one. 

Relationship is what drives the story. Whatever plot there is, whatever outside influences there are, it is all about who these people are and what they���re going to bring to each other.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.

In good writing, words become one with things.

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Books are for nothing but to inspire.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Anne Lamott

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories...

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

In general���there���s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we���re going to die; what���s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author John Keats

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Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music.

I want a brighter word than bright.

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Octavia E. Butler

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You don���t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it���s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you���re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won���t. Habit is persistence in practice.

It���s amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you���re communicating what you think you���re communicating. It���s so easy as a young writer to think you���re been very clear when in fact you haven���t.

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

I write about people who do extraordinary things. It just turned out that it was called science fiction.

My writing can be a kind of therapy for me, and I���m sure some of their origins extend well back into my childhood.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author E.B. White

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A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer���s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments ��� moments of sustained creation ��� when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer���s time isn���t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Anne Enright

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The first 12 years [of writing] are the worst.

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

��� all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn���t matter how ���real��� your story is, or how ���made up���: what matters is its necessity.

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ��finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Orson Scott Card

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Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don���t see any.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.

The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I'm just plain not talented or skillful enough to write. That's the dilemma every storyteller faces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Celia Brayfield

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We have always learned about life by dramatizing our questions.

Since you know readers are trying to second guess your story, you can start teasing them. Since they are listening for a bullet, fire a silent one. Play with their expectations.

There is a kind of character burn-out which is more than just a temporary failure of invention. This happens when you project yourself too far into a character

The reassurance that human nature is not fundamentally evil, that love can conquer death, that women and men are not enemies, that the wicked will ultimately fail and the good triumph after adversity, is what the reader seeks in a story.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Jack Gilbert

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Lying in front of the house all/afternoon, trying to write a poem./Falling asleep./Waking up under the stars.

I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!