“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, –happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”

Brenda Ueland

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

E. L. Doctorow

A special quote for an excellent writing teacher’s birthday. Happy belated, Kevin Miller, thanks for teaching me that you can drive all the way up a snowy mountain of writing –as long as you remember to keep your plow down.

“Writing isn’t generally a lucrative source of income; only a few, exceptional writers reach the income levels associated with the best-sellers. Rather, most of us write because we can make a modest living, or even supplement our day jobs, doing something about which we feel passionately. Even at the worst of times, when nothing goes right, when the prose is clumsy and the ideas feel stale, at least we’re doing something that we genuinely love. There’s no other reason to work this hard, except that love.”

Melissa Scott

Don’t forget to swing by tonight and check out our freshly-printed copies of a vintage book: How to Grow a Small Vegetable Garden. Visit 291 River St. between 5-8 to see how a book is made, and take home a free copy!

“The adjective is the enemy of the noun.”

Voltaire

“As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.”

Mark Twain

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

Stephen King

Come visit us at 291 River St. this Friday during Troy Night Out, between 5-8, and see how a book is made.

The Troy Book Makers will be binding freshly-printed copies of a vintage book: How to Grow a Small Vegetable Garden. Visit for a free copy!  Mix and mingle with writers and book-lovers –and find out how you can get started on a project of your own!

Here’s a sneak peak of the gardening book:

“I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways of keeping readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell students to make their characters want something, even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

My mother used to work at a library with Kurt Vonnegut’s brother, which is pretty cool.

“I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.”

Clarence Budington Kelland

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

Ernest Hemingway

And, of course, backing up Hemingway’s testament to what makes a writer, is this little gem:

“Put weather in.”

Joseph Hansen

Sage advice to the beginner, sir, sage advice.

Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

William Safire