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...

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

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

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

Matthew Arnold

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

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

Gloria Steinem

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

Tom Clancy

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

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

Jodi Picoult

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

Jeanette Walls

The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.

Douglas Adams

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

C. J. Cherryh

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

E. B. White

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.