All Quotes By Tag: Writing-craft

“The hard part is putting one word after another.”

“You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict… (“Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read”)”

“…each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally… (“Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read”)”

“Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared… (“Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read”)”

“… And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive–to be multi-dimensional–you must barter away some control.”

“Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.”

“I’m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.”

“I say fuck the old advice ‘show, don’t tell.’ It’s called story TELLING for a reason, and I’ll stick to it!”

“Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.”

“Rules such as “Write what you know,” and “Show, don’t tell,” while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.”

“A dear and long-time friend,… asked me, “Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?” I replied, “Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its own rules. But for a statement to the world at large, once I’ve thought a book through and written it in my mind, it takes me around a week or so, depending on this and that, ordinarily at the rate of a chapter a day, but I’ve had some two-chapters day and some chapters have taken two days. And then of course there is revision, but around a week is about right.” He seemed surprised, and I was surprised by his surprise, so I thought, maybe I’m wrong. I went home and wrote this book, at the perfectly normal pace of a chapter a day, as usual…”

“I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.”

“So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book’s form hardened.”

“grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.”

“Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.”