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Writing Craft Quotes

Browse 130 quotes about Writing Craft.

Writing Craft Quotes

“What if the work resisted restraint because it was not meant to be restrained? What if she had very nearly everything she needed for the book to take shape, except for the courage to let it find its own shape? She stopped wrestling with the work so she could dance with it instead. I watched the wheels turn right in front of me, and I saw in Austin a mind simultaneously at work and play. I saw a writer doing their job and a woman remembering who the hell she was and what she wanted.”

FeminismBlack Women QuotesWriting CraftBlack Authors
Book:Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-possession
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“Calvin's Mom confronts him as he stands at the open front door, going to school: Calvin, are you going to take that stuffed tiger to school again? Calvin: Sure. Calvin's Mom: Don't the kids make fun of you? Calvin: Tommy Chestnutt did once, and now nobody does. Calvin's Mom: Why? What happened to Tommy Chestnutt ? Calvin: Hobbes ate him! Hobbes [The stuffed tiger]: Ugh! He needed a bath, too.”

WritingHumorChildhoodSatireWriting CraftHumoristHumorist Extraordinaire
Book:Calvin & Hobbes
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“[Uh-oh, it's bath time for Calvin.] MOM, who sits in the living room, has turned toward the door. Very likely she is screaming the following words at the top of her lungs: CALVIN! Quiet down and quit that splashing! I don't want to have to clean the whole bathroom! CALVIN: Ha! I pulled the plug! Down the drain with you! DIE, FIEND! DIE, DIE!! MOM [By now she's sitting in a normal position on her armchair, trying to read a book, when she has apparently just heard an unexpected noise]: Don't tell me he's letting the water out already. CALVIN, now standing right in back of his mother. He's naked, scowling full force, and dripping: Believe it, lady.”

WritingHumorChildhoodSatireWriting CraftHumoristHumorist Extraordinaire
Book:Calvin & Hobbes
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“[At first, Calvin's at school, in his classroom.] CALVIN'S TEACHER: "We'll see what the principal has to say about your attention span, young man." A THOUGHT BUBBLE FANTASY FROM CALVIN's MIND (With visuals to match.) "The valiant Spaceman Spiff has been captured." A THOUGHT BUBBLE FANTASY FROM CALVIN's MIND (With visuals to match, coming from a space alien.) "The aliens doubtlessly want the secret formula to the Atomic Napalm Neutralizer!" ANOTHER THOUGHT BUBBLE FANTASY FROM CALVIN's MIND "Moments from the torture chamber, Spiff springs into ACTION." CALVIN, HIS TEACHER, AND THE PRINCIPAL. (The school principal is looking at Calvin, who seems intent on something...) THE PRINCIPAL: "Why is he eating his hall pass?”

WritingHumorChildhoodSatireWriting CraftHumoristHumorist Extraordinaire
Book:Calvin & Hobbes
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“Sometimes an author is torn between the desire to present certain material and a guilty awareness that others will not approve. In an attempt to deflect criticism, he apologizes as he goes, pointing out that the minstrel show, strip club visit, or cheap, all-purpose servants in a Third World setting are terribly, terribly distasteful to him, and he disapproves as much as anyone—more! Meanwhile, he continues to wallow in these scenes, exposing what everyone instantly recognizes as the world of his fantasies. The result is often reminiscent of a sixties sexploitation movie on the dangers of promiscuity.”

WritingSexShameGuiltWriting AdvicePolitical CorrectnessWriting Craft
Author:Howard Mittelmark, Sandra Newman
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“Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.”

PracticeConfidenceWritersWriting ProcessWriting CraftNothing To Say
Book:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
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“According to Wallace, the expectation that art amuses is a 'poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with,' since it places all of the power with the audience, sometimes breeding resentment on the part of the author. 'I can see it in myself and in other young writers,' he told McCaffery: 'this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.' Wallace expressed his 'hostility' by writing unwieldy sentences, refusing to fulfill readers' expectations, and 'bludgeoning the reader with data'--all strategies he used to wrestle back some of the power held by modern audiences.”

Writing AdviceWriting CraftDfwDavid Foster Wallace
Book:The Brief Bedford Reader
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“We fiction writers have a responsibility when creating a character; he or she must sit beside us as we read the story. If she isn’t, we haven’t done our job. Therefore, writing Dr. T’s character forced a plunge into places I had no interest in going. A person like Adam Turner would not have come into this beautiful world looking for a kid to control, manipulate, or wreck. There had to be a reason- that created massive psychic wounds.”

StorytellingWriting ProcessWriting LifeFiction WritingCharacter DevelopmentWriting CraftWriting CommunityAuthor LifeCharacter ArcAuthor Thoughts
Author:Dawn Chalker
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“It was almost as if, in all those many years of not writing on a regular basis, the words had stacked up by the door, clogging things up, making me feel stuck. Now that I started to write again, the door opened and the waiting words tumbled out, relieved to be set free.”

CreativityFlowCreative ProcessTrue SelfWriting ProcessWriting CraftCreative FlowFlow StateTrue VoiceCreative Leap
Book:Leap With Me: A Creative Path to Finding and Following Your True Voice
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“...I’ve never understood the logic that says a work doesn’t need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I’ve also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer.”

StoryWriters On WritingWriting CraftGenre BendingGenre FictionGenre ConventionsGenre ConstraintsGingernuts Of Horror InterviewWriting Genre
Author:Glen Hirshberg
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“Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.”

WritingRunningSportsYogaCoffeeWriters On WritingWriting ProcessWriting LifeWriting AdviceWriters QuotesWriters And WritingCaffeineWriting PhilosophyYoga InspirationJoggingWriting CraftYoga PracticeWriting InspirationRoman PayneYoga PosesYoga PosturesYoga SutraExcerciseRunning Through The WoodsWriter InspirationHathaWriter SAshtangaExcercisingJardin Du LuxembourgYogasutraLuxembourg GardensVinyasaWriter S Craft
Author:Roman Payne
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“Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and . . . read. But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you’ve become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes.”

WritingRatsGreat WritingWriting CraftGreat WriterWriting Excellence
Book:On Being a Rat and Other Observations
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“Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.”

WritingNovelistsWriterWritersWriters On WritingWriting ProcessWriting LifeWriting AdviceWriters QuotesWriters And WritingWriters LifeWriting PhilosophyWriting CraftWriting InspirationWriting TipsWriting From The HeartNovelistWriting InspirationalWriter InspirationNovelists LifeNovelist QuotesNovelist And Poet
Book:The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition
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“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.”

WritingWritersArchitectWriters On WritingWriting ProcessGardenerWriting CraftCraft
Author:George R.R. Martin
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“I write to find strength. I write to become the person that hides inside me. I write to light the way through the darkness for others. I write to be seen and heard. I write to be near those I love. I write by accident, promptings, purposefully and anywhere there is paper. I write because my heart speaks a different language that someone needs to hear. I write past the embarrassment of exposure. I write because hypocrisy doesn’t need answers, rather it needs questions to heal. I write myself out of nightmares. I write because I am nostalgic, romantic and demand happy endings. I write to remember. I write knowing conversations don’t always take place. I write because speaking can’t be reread. I write to sooth a mind that races. I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand. I write because my emotions belong to the moon; high tide, low tide. I write knowing I will fall on my words, but no one will say it was for very long. I write because I want to paint the world the way I see love should be. I write to provide a legacy. I write to make sense out of senselessness. I write knowing I will be killed by my own words, stabbed by critics, crucified by both misunderstanding and understanding. I write for the haters, the lovers, the lonely, the brokenhearted and the dreamers. I write because one day someone will tell me that my emotions were not a waste of time. I write because God loves stories. I write because one day I will be gone, but what I believed and felt will live on.”

WritingStoriesDesireChoicesBooksLegacyWritersHobbiesPublishersLife PurposeWriteAuthorsNovelsWriting CraftCraftInspirational WritersRomance WritersCoauthorsWhy Do You WriteWriting Industry
Author:Shannon L. Alder
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“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”

WritingLiteratureBooksWriting Craft
Book:Why I Write
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“I get up in the morning every day because I want to read and see our voices on the page. I want to see them in libraries. I want to be writing stories about our community as a proud Chicano but also as a writer who has expertly crafted stories so that everybody will appreciate a different perspective. I want to show others that we have the ability to tell complex, innovative, even shockingly revolutionary stories that open people’s eyes.”

Writing ProcessWriting CraftMexican AmericanChicanoSergio TroncosoChicanos
Book:Nobody's Pilgrims
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