“When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.” Samuel Butler
writing tips
Thursday Quote: William Saroyan
“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive,…
Thursday Quote: Tad Williams
“…I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or imagination, whatever you want to call it, and if I made the characters as real and honest as I could, then no matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious…
Thursday Quote: Jane Yolen
“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” Jane Yolen
Thursday Quote: Brenda Ueland
“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
Thursday Quote: E. L. Doctorow
“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.…
Thursday Quote: Advice on the Subject of Adverbs and Adjectives
“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
Thursday Quote: Kurt Vonnegut
“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…
Thursday Quote: Clarence Budington Kelland
“I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.” Clarence Budington Kelland
Thursday Quote: Ernest Hemingway (assisted by Joseph Hansen)
“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…