Rob Bignell's Blog, page 2

Great Writing Quotes by Author Stephen Leacock

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself ��� it is the occurring which is difficult.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy ��� it���s the occurring that���s hard.

...to write something out of one���s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

To write well it is first necessary to have something to say.

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 Louise Erdrich

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It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.

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 Franz Kafka

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Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Don���t bend; don���t water it down; don���t try to make it logical; don���t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

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 Lydia Davis

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Do what you want to do, and don't worry if it's a little odd or doesn't fit the market.

Work hard and meticulously. When in trouble, look closely at a text that is a good example of what you're trying to do. And be patient.

As the writer, I may choose to ignore the emotional heart of the matter, and focus on details, and trust that the heart of the matter will be conveyed nevertheless.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.

I don't believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her; the reader may then find the poem difficult.

Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I'm going on. You need at least two brains to write.

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 Jules Renard

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The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Style means the right word. The rest matters little.

Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page; it writes three hundred.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

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 Patricia Highsmith

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The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later.

I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

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 Roy Peter Clark

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If a period is a stop sign, then what kind of traffic flow is created by other marks? The comma is a speed bump; the semicolon is what a driver education teacher calls a ���rolling stop���; the parenthetical expression is a detour; the colon is a flashing yellow light that announces something important up ahead; the dash is a tree branch in the road.

Writing is not magic. It���s a craft, a process, a set of steps. As with any process, things sometimes break down. Even in a good story, the writer runs into problems. So the act of writing always includes problem solving.

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

Having the urge to write is one thing; acting on it is another.

Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence.

Riffing on language will create wonderful effects you never intended. Which leads me to this writing advice: ���Always take credit for good stuff you didn't intend, because you'll be getting plenty of criticism in your career for bad stuff you didn't mean either.���

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 Gabriela Mistral

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The poet is an untier of knots, and love without words is a knot, and it drowns.

I write poetry because I can���t disobey the impulse; it would be like blocking a spring that surges up in my throat. For a long time I���ve been the servant of the song that comes, that appears and can���t be buried away. How to seal myself up now?���It no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel.

Writing tends to cheer me; it always soothes my spirit and blesses me with the gift of an innocent, tender, childlike day. It is the sensation of having spent a few hours in my homeland, with my customs, free whims, my total freedom.

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 Tom Clancy

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The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf. You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn���t divinely inspired���it���s hard work.

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

The only way to do all the things you���d like to do is to read.

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: ���What if?��� and ���What next?��� (A third question, ���What now?���, is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it���s more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if ���X��� happened? That���s how you start.

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 Valeria Luiselli

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I like reading the world through a writer's eyes, rather than seeing a writer looking at him or herself as if at the center of gravity of the world around them.

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it's said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions.

Writers tend to think they occupy a much more relevant place in society than we actually do. But we really are closer to buffoons and jesters than we are to whistle-blowers or moral guides. Accepting our rather insignificant place in society can be depressing - but it's also freeing.

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!