Rob Bignell's Blog, page 9
June 15, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Heather Sellers
Becoming a writer means being creative enough to find the time and the place in your life for writing.
When you write, you believe in something no one else can see. You spend lots of time committed to a project for which there are no assurances, no guarantees. Being a writer subjects you to the same doubts, the same unpopularity, the same nagging questions that believers struggle with. Writing is communing with the unseen���
Writing a book is exactly like love. You don���t hold back. You give it everything you have. If it doesn���t work out, you���re heartbroken, but you move forward and start again anyway. You have to. You don���t hold some of yourself in reserve. It���s all or nothing. There are no guarantees.
Writing is a physical art. And writing a book is a lot more like making a complex sculpture out of bronze than writing a whole bunch of reports. What's in your head does not count, not for sculpture, not for book writing. Pencil on paper is what matters. Words on paper, pages and pages, chapter after chapter.
Writing is making a mess, and then working and reworking to create a beautiful piece.
I started writing everything down. I wrote for the same reason someone lost sticks a message in a bottle: I���m here. Help. Please find me.
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!
June 14, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author David Morrell
You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, ���This is me, this what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I���m doing the best I can ��� buy me or not ��� but this is who I am as a writer.
Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.
If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way.
Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be.
Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind. The chances are that you'll never make them identical.
Don���t expect a magic formula that���ll make books fall out of your head and automatically give you a wide readership.
As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.
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!
June 13, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Gloria Steinem
Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don���t feel I should be doing something else.
I do not like to write ��� I like to have written.
Writing keeps me from believing everything I read.
For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead: (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, nice in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening.
Most writers write to say something about other people - and it doesn't last. Good writers write to find out about themselves - and it lasts forever.
Writing is always harder than talking.
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!
June 12, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author William Goldman
The key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not in the way it expects.
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it.
No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.
I write out of revenge.
The easiest thing to do on earth is not write���But this is life on earth, you can't have everything.
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!
June 11, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Colette
���an author is one who can judge his own stuff���s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Put down everything that comes into your head and then you���re a writer.
To write is to pour one���s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one���s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy.
To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized, at the reflection of the window in the silver ink-stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and ladened with treasures that one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp.
To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it ��� and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.
To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed jib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective.��� The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.
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!
June 10, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Richard Bach
A professional writer is an amateur who didn���t quit.
It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.
When I'm writing it's as if I'm the observer. It's as if that computer screen there - it used to be the typewriter - just kind of dissolves and there's this whirling tunnel of mist and there's a kind of proscenium arch, and then there are my characters, and they say what they say, and I laugh sometimes in surprise at what they say.
I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil.
The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.
The big thing about writing is three commands: Have fun. Don't think. Don't care.
Books aren���t written on whim or promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writings a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.
It's like a pulsar inside me. There is this great burst of energy, forcing me to write, and then the star goes quiet for a time, and I think it's gone, but it's gathering energy for another burst. And I seem to be almost unwilling participants in this.
I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil.
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!
June 9, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Mignon McLaughlin
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.
Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.
There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.
Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.
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!
June 8, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author David Foster Wallace
Good fiction���s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice���
���when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you���re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction.
���there���s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing.
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!
June 7, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Erica Jong
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.
The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you���ll never write a line.
You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
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!
June 6, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Terry Pratchett
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
There���s no such thing as writer���s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn���t write.
Making history, it turned out, was quite easy. It was what got written down. It was as simple as that.
Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they���ve found it.
Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.
���people think that it���s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words ��� that���s how long a novel is.
I used to like reading and you read enough books and you overflow and then you start writing.
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!
