Post number one. Hi there!

19 Nov, 2015

Welcome to the Ghostwriters Central blog. This blog will be authored by me, for the time being. We do hope you will find it to be useful, informative or entertaining. Or all three. --Michael McKown.

Post number one. Hi there!

November 19, 2015June 6, 2026

Welcome to the Ghostwriters Central blog. This blog will be authored by me, for the time being. We do hope you will find it to be Read More...

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

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

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

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

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

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

Tom Clancy

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.