Welcome to the Ghostwriters Central blog. This blog will be authored by me, for the time being. We do hope you will find it to be useful, informative or entertaining. Or all three. –Michael McKown.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
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.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
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.
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.
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.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
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.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
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.
What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
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.