Writing Past Dark Quotes

“Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

“We should be told: Write fast, write close to the bone, write for ten hours straight until you’re not thinking in words anymore, but in colors, in smells, in waves of memory. Right what you care about. Don’t write one more word you don’t care about. Don’t waste any more of your life on what does not matter to you. Write only what matters to you—those scenes, those dialogues. Get messy. Before you get neat, get very, very messy. Write until you are more alive than you have ever been before.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

“Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

“Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer the person who could write it.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

“Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely. We can unlock our lives with a pencil tip.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

“Talent is not rare. What’s rare is the devotion and stamina to keep writing, and the ability to build on the successes that your work already displays.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

“To gain the book, one must give up all hope for the book. It is the only way the book can get written.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

“Stories hang from the trees, hive under the coffee table, gather like glass on the corners of the road. To pick them up one needs simply to focus one’s eye and keep a steady hand. Writing focuses the eye; writing develops the steadiness of one’s hand.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

“Olga Broumas visiting Iowa, and after her talk I asked her a question I had wanted to ask someone for years: “How do you endure the long times when you cannot write?” She said in that room full of writers and readers, “Even when I cannot write, I know I am still a writer, just the way I know I am still sexual even if I have not had a lover for many months.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

“Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.”
― Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life