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The coolest ghostwriting blog on the planet.

Ding! Going down? An astonishing description of the World Trade Center collapse.

June 2, 2026June 3, 2026

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Mr. & Mrs. Vintage Typewriters, Bremerton, WA.

May 31, 2026June 3, 2026

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A.I. writing and publishing: Busted!

May 20, 2026June 13, 2026

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Why independent thinking matters to writers.

March 13, 2026June 3, 2026

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How desktop publishing put a Linotronic Imagesetter in my office.

March 12, 2026June 3, 2026

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The late-night drunk caller.

March 11, 2026June 3, 2026

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Screening ghostwriters: Run a simple test.

December 27, 2025June 3, 2026

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How a professor caught students cheating by writing with A.I.

November 20, 2025June 3, 2026

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The great dinner delay of August 3, 2015.

October 2, 2025June 3, 2026

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Which to write first – the manuscript or screenplay?

September 3, 2025October 9, 2025

Write the manuscript first, or the screenplay? By- Michael McKown Co-founder & president, Ghostwriters Central, Inc. Book or Read More...

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.