Janet Reid is a literary agent and she has a blog. It seems that many publishers, traditional as well as publish-on-demand, are Read More...
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.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
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.
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.
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.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
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.
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.
Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
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.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
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.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

























