Can you use a good laugh? David Thorne is an Australian writer, humorist and satirist. I think he’s a really funny guy. Read More...
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
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.
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.

























