Because every
story begins
with words

Eight secrets to writing a low-budget movie

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Eight secrets to writing a low-budget movie.

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

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

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.

George Singleton

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Mickey Spillane

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

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

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

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

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

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

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

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

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