Blog

The coolest ghostwriting blog on the planet.

Ding! Going down? An astonishing description of the World Trade Center collapse.

June 2, 2026June 3, 2026

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Mr. & Mrs. Vintage Typewriters, Bremerton, WA.

May 31, 2026June 3, 2026

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A.I. writing and publishing: Busted!

May 20, 2026June 13, 2026

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Why independent thinking matters to writers.

March 13, 2026June 3, 2026

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How desktop publishing put a Linotronic Imagesetter in my office.

March 12, 2026June 3, 2026

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The late-night drunk caller.

March 11, 2026June 3, 2026

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Screening ghostwriters: Run a simple test.

December 27, 2025June 3, 2026

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How a professor caught students cheating by writing with A.I.

November 20, 2025June 3, 2026

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The great dinner delay of August 3, 2015.

October 2, 2025June 3, 2026

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Which to write first – the manuscript or screenplay?

September 3, 2025October 9, 2025

Write the manuscript first, or the screenplay? By- Michael McKown Co-founder & president, Ghostwriters Central, Inc. Book or 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.

Harlan Ellison

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

John Legend

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

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.

Robert McKee

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

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

Stephen King

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

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

Neil Gaiman

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

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

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.

Elbert Hubbard

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.