Post number one. Hi there!

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Post number one. Hi there!

November 19, 2015July 21, 2023 368

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.

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

Michael Burke

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.

William C. Gault

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.

Bob Dylan

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

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

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

Matthew Arnold

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

Truman Capote

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

Steven Bochco

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.

Quentin Tarantino

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

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

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

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.