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...

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

Stephen King

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

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

Christopher Hampton

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

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

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

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

Gloria Steinem

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.

William Faulkner

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

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

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

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

M. K. Simmons

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

Mickey Spillane

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

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

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

Jim Morrison

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.