Krysta Voskowsky > Krysta's Quotes

“Publishing is a business based on fiction—and not only the fiction that is packaged between book covers or sold as digital downloads. In order to convince harried, distracted people to set aside hours or even days to read hundreds of pages of non-animated words, we in the publishing business must manufacture an aura of success around a book, a glowing sheen that purrs I am worth your time. This aura is conveyed through breathless jacket copy, seductive cover imagery, and blurbs dripping with praise so thick the words seem painted on with honey. This fiction of success is stoked by the fiction of buzz and sustained by the fiction of social media.”
― Manjula Martin, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living

“Most people start the day by checking email, texts, and social media. And most people struggle to be successful. It’s not a coincidence.”
― Hal Elrod, The Miracle Morning for Writers: How to Build a Writing Ritual That Increases Your Impact and Your Income, Before 8AM

“On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.”
― Sara Sheridan

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show is how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.
Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.
Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it. But tradition may crystallize imagination to the point of fossilizing it as dogma and forbidding new ideas. Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, and invent their own ways to live.
As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on way they should be teaching -- what we need, what life ought to be. In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media. It's a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone.
Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.
What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Well-meaning writers who were looking to expose and condemn what he had been doing to me and to the dozens of targets he moved on to afterward wrote a bunch of stories about his shoddy reporting and social media harassment of abuse victims. The problem is that you fundamentally cannot shame someone who is proud of what they are doing. Press coverage doesn’t result in bans or removals from services; it gives bad actors and whatever private, sensitive, or fictional information they’re spreading about their targets a visibility boost to a new audience.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.”
― Margaret Atwood

“When I first started following writers on social media, I imagined a deluge of profound quotes, writing tips and insights into the plight of wordsmiths. There was some of that. Mostly though, my timeline was taken up with their obsession with coffee: 'I want coffee/I'm having coffee/I've had coffee.' Then came photos of their favourite coffee mug/pot/shop/barista. So, if you've enjoyed a recently-published book, give credit to writers: the vampiric aficionados of the coffee cherry.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Social media activity can draw on the same creativity and imagination as your "serious" work. Ideally, whatever you post connects back to the motivations and themes that drive your writing. The most important thing you can do on any social network is to share things you care about—to express something meaningful rather than dutiful. Never throw up a link or a photo without giving the story behind it, or explaining why it matters to you. People crave meaning.”
― Jane Friedman, The Business of Being a Writer

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Heinlein's Rules for Writers

Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society... Writing is today's currency for good ideas.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Marketing is not what lures a writer to this pursuit. Marketing is the adversary that arrives smuggled inside the Trojan Horse of one’s creative impulse.”
― Jane Friedman

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
― Brene Brown

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft