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Post number one. Hi there!

November 19, 2015May 9, 2025 967

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.

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.

Mark Twain

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

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.

J.K. Rowling

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

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.

Robert Altman

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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.

Truman Capote Quote

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

Jodi Picoult

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

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

William Goldman

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

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.

Michael Crichton

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.

Alice Munro

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

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.

Orson Scott Card

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

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.