Joe Carlen, one of our expert writers, sent over a new article on writing website content, business blog post and social media text. It Read More...
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.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
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.
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.
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.
Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.
A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

























