Have you heard of reader's block? - blog | 888-743-9939

Blog

You’ve heard of writer’s block. But have you heard of reader’s block?

August 5, 2019May 9, 2025 998

I found this in the August 2nd, 2019, New York Times. Fun reading…if you’re not suffering from reader’s block:

Reader’s block article

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

Stephen King

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

Thomas Wolfe

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

Romulus Linney

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

Michael Burke

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

Raymond Chandler

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

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

Mickey Spillane

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

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

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

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

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

William Shawn

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

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

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

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

Steven Bochco

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