Interesting. However, none of my writers works for free. And you don’t work for free, either. Can’t help you. Michael McKown Read More...
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
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.”
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.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
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.
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.
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.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
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.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
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.
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.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

























