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Video: Stuck for words? A pro writer can get it done for you.

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

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

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.

Elbert Hubbard

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.

John Campbell

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

Jim Morrison

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

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

William Goldman

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

William Shawn

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

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

C. J. Cherryh

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

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

G.K. Chesterton

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

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

Jeanette Walls

A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

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

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

E. B. White

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