Because every
story begins
with words

video should you write the book first, or the screenplay?

Video: Should you write the book manuscript first, or the screenplay?

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

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.

Orson Scott Card

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

T.S. Eliot

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

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

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

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

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

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

M. K. Simmons

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

Romulus Linney

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

Edward Albee

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

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

Matthew Arnold

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

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

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

Steven Bochco

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

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

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