Because every
story begins
with words

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Video: Professional writers – How we got a client to pay up.

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

Christopher Hampton

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

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

C. J. Cherryh

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

Michael Burke

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

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

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

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

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.

William Faulkner

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

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

Sidney Sheldon

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

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

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