It was about two weeks ago when Ghostwriters Central founding partner Michael McKown texted his fellow founding partner and told him to Read More...
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.
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.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
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.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
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.
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.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.
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.
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.
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.
























