“If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.”
—William Campbell Gault
June 2012
30 posts
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It wasn’t that I couldn’t write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn’t budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn’t been pretty damn cool. But they were cool, showed a lot of promise.
Would also have been fine if I could have just jumped to something else. But I couldn’t. All the other novels I tried sucked worse than the stalled one, and even more disturbing, I seemed to have lost the ability to write short stories. It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn’t find an exit. Like I’d been chained to the sinking ship of those 75 pages and there was no key and no patching the hole in the hull.
I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, but nothing I produced was worth a damn… Because, in truth, I didn’t become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.
” —Junot Dìaz
“I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”
—Stephen King (via amandaonwriting)
“You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.”
—Gene Wolfe
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What I’m trying to say is, There are as many ways to be “girly” as there are girls in this world. There are always going to be people out there telling you that if you like things pop culture tells you are girly, you’re stupid, and that if you claim to like things pop culture tells you are guy stuff, you’re lying. And what I’m saying is that all these people are full of crap.
Love what you love. Be proud of it.
” —Claudia Grey, from her fabulous post “I’m not like the other girls.”
J’adore.
“Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters’ stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist’s.”
—Sarah Waters
Meg Gardiner on writing characters
“Create characters who talk and laugh and ache like people we know in real life.”
“A strong character needs a vivid personality, real presence on the page, and the determination to dig deep when it counts. He or she must find the resources and courage to rise to the challenge the story flings at them – in the face of ridicule, shame, exile, danger, or death.”
(via Terrible Minds)
“You think you have writer’s block, oh precious one? Here’s a cure: Sit down, and write (or type) ‘I don’t know what to write’ one hundred times. Then do it again. And again. When you get bored of it, go back to your work in progress or start something new. Doing this gives you and the goddamn Muse the clearest possible message that you are committed to this monkeypoo-flinging Festivus thing. Here’s another: Do it every day. Get into the habit of sitting your ass down on a daily basis and committing an act or two of writing. Get a kitchen timer, set it for fifteen minutes, and go. Do it again. There, you’ve done a half hour of writing. Even five minutes of writing is better than none. And another: Get a deadline. Deadlines concentrate the mind wonderfully.
All those solutions hinge on one simple thing: making writing a priority. If it is important to you, you will find a way. You find time to wander around the Internet, you find time to watch telly, you find time to do all sorts of things. Time does not magically appear for writing. Like any relationship, your love affair with the written word takes work and a willingness to pay attention and make it important.” —Lilith Saintcrow, on her blog
All those solutions hinge on one simple thing: making writing a priority. If it is important to you, you will find a way. You find time to wander around the Internet, you find time to watch telly, you find time to do all sorts of things. Time does not magically appear for writing. Like any relationship, your love affair with the written word takes work and a willingness to pay attention and make it important.” —Lilith Saintcrow, on her blog
“You need more than a beginning if you’re going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you’ve written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.”
—Neil Gaiman (via therealkdgreen)
“Honestly, good sentences are things that are a byproduct of writing a story. You write a novel and on the way you try and figure out how to say what you need to, and sometimes good sentences get made, and you keep going.”
—Neil Gaiman, on his tumblr
“I didn’t know if people would think my book was good or bad or horrible or beautiful and I didn’t care. I only knew I no longer had two hearts beating in my chest. I’d pulled one out with my own bare hands. I’d suffered. I’d given it everything I had.”
—Dear Sugar, The Rumpus Advice Column #48
“We get the work done on the ground level. And the kindest thing I can do for you is to tell you to get your ass on the floor. I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you ‘have it in you’ is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your ‘limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude’ is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some ways inept. This is true of every writer, and it’s especially true of writers who are 26. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.”
—Dear Sugar, The Rumpus Advice Column #48
“Where do you get your ideas? people ask. Sometimes they’re at the bottoms of cups of tea. Sometimes they’re lurking in my shower. Sometimes they’re waiting patiently in glass cases in museums.”
—Erin Morgenstern, “On Research and Museums”, on her blog
“One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer — I’ve said this from a slightly different angle in another answer — is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you’re going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you’ve turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you’re never going to write well enough. Of course that’s what keeps you trying — trying as hard as you can — which is a good thing. As I started off saying, writing takes practise.”
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Robin McKinley, on advice to those who would like to be writers (via dinosaurjam)
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again… who doesn’t heart McKinley?
(via sarahreesbrennan)
“When a fictional character starts keeping secrets from the writer, that’s when that character becomes real.”
—Steven Moffat (via relatedworlds)
“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.”
—John Steinbeck (via mysticsoul)
“Give your manuscript a chance. Keep going and believing and don’t be discouraged by drivel. A little or sometimes a lot of drivel must fall into every manuscript. Revision, rewriting, editing…we have lots of chances to make our ugly ducklings swans.”
—Brian Yansky, on his blog
“One of the things about writing is that if you want to improve, you have to work at it yourself. Nobody is going to make you practice; nobody is going to force you to get better.”
— Patricia C. Wrede, “Trying to Improve”, on her blog
