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, 2015May 9, 2025

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...

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

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

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

Jodi Picoult

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

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

Tom Clancy

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

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

Mickey Spillane

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Roddy Doyle

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

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

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

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

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.