2,000 to 10,000 Quotes

“Who is the writer here? YOU ARE. Whose book is it? YOUR BOOK. There are no writing police. No one is going to arrest you if you write a teen vampire novel post Twilight. No one is going to send you off to a desert island to live a wretched life of worm eating and regret because your book includes things that could be seen as cliché.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“A book is not a battle, nor is it a conquest. A book is a story, and telling it should be an enjoyable exercise.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Putting my book down should be the hardest thing my reader has to do that day. Authorship is a merciless business!”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Even if you’re not selling your stories yet, your writing time is precious, often gained at the expense of other worthwhile activities. Don’t waste it on a book you don’t love.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“do NOT go pulling things you like out of your novel because some forum person told you your idea "won't sell.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Never put a scene you don't love in your book.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“If you want to write faster, the first step is to know what you're writing before you write it.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Editing is writing. If you like writing, you like editing.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Advance the story Reveal new information Pull the reader forward”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“no character was ever defined by the shade of his locks.)”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write that day. Sometimes it wasn't even a paragraph, just a list of this happens, then that, then that. This one simple change—those five stupid minutes—boosted my word count more than any other single thing I’ve ever done. I went from writing 2k a day to 5k a day within a week without increasing my 6-hour writing block. Some days, I even finished early.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“I’ve never bought into muses or any of the more spiritual parts of writing, but I will admit that all my books have a unique feel, almost like a taste in my mind that belongs to that book alone.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“(You'll notice how I didn't mention beta readers before this, right? Well, that's because I don't believe in using beta readers before I've edited my book completely myself. First, I think its rude to ask someone to read something as unfinished as a typical first draft, and second, if I rely on others to spot my problems for me, then I'm not growing as an editor or a writer. Save the fresh, foreign eyeballs for the problems you can't find on your own. Anything else is a waste of everyone's time.)”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Mine have run anywhere from 200 words to the mid-3000s depending on how much needed to be done. Note that phrase, “needed to be done,” because that’s what scenes do in a novel. They get things done.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“One of the earliest lessons I learned about writing was that if I was stuck, it was because I didn't know something.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“If you don’t think you can wrap up all your story threads neatly in one novel, either cut some characters, or go ahead and think of this book as the first in a series.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“For example, I keep all my actual writing in the Manuscript section divided by chapter, and then, in the research section, I have folders for Setting, Characters, and Plot with a separate area for my cuts file (where I put big blocks of text that I’ve cut out of the story but can’t bring myself to delete yet) and my writing worksheet, which is the table I use to keep track of my word counts.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn as a writer is that while virtually any story can be a good book if done correctly, not every story should. It’s possible to have an amazing idea and still lack the interest necessary to polish it to publication level shine. I can not tell you the number of books I’ve plotted, written 30k words in, and then abandoned because I simply could not stand to look at them another second. Every single one of these ideas looked great on paper, and maybe in another author’s hands they could have been golden, but in the end I just didn’t care enough to push through.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“the single most efficient change you can make isn’t actually upping your daily word count, but eliminating the days where you are not writing.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Storytelling is a business of unique snowflakes. Every writer is different; every book is different; every reader is different. This is why it’s so hard to give writing advice, because what works for me might be poison to someone else. But if I could make one absolute assertion, it would be this: If you are not enjoying your writing, you’re doing it wrong. A book is not a battle, nor is it a conquest. A book is a story, and telling it should be an enjoyable exercise. So the next time you don’t want to write, don’t waste time beating yourself up. Instead, stop and ask yourself why. Why do you not want to do this fundamentally enjoyable thing? What’s really going on?”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Once I shifted my thinking, though, I stopped roughing myself up and started asking Why? Why don’t you want to write? What’s wrong? And while the answers were never pleasant (because really, it’s no fun to realize you messed up and now you have to rewrite a scene, or a chapter, or half a book), they were progress, and they were necessary. They were also extremely good for me, because once I got my story back on the right track, my bad writing days vanished, my daily word counts shot up, the quality of my writing improved, and life in general got a whole lot better.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Now, instead of treating bad writing days as random, unavoidable disasters to be weathered, like thunderstorms, I started treating them as red flags.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Writing a very personal journey, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a slow one. Sometimes, all it takes is a new way of looking at the problem to change everything.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“Every day, while I was writing out my description of what I was going to write for the knowledge component of the triangle, I would play the scene through in my mind and try to get excited about it. I'd look for all the cool little hooks, the parts that interested me most, and focus on those since they were obviously what made the scene cool. If I couldn't find anything to get excited over, then I would change the scene, or get rid of it entirely. I decided then and there that, no matter how useful a scene might be for my plot, boring scenes had no place in my novels.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“If I had scenes that were so boring I didn't want to write them, then there was no way anyone would want to read them. This was my novel, after all. If I didn't love it, no one would.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“The days when I broke 10k were the days when I was writing scenes I'd been dying to write since I planned the book.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“The longer I wrote, the faster I wrote, and, I believe, the better I wrote.”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“So, I started keeping records. Every day I sat down to write, I would note the time I started, the time I stopped, how many words I wrote, and where I was writing on a spreadsheet”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“As the great General Patton once said, “a pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood,”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love

“lo and”
― Rachel Aaron, 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love