Top 61 Advice For Writers Quotes
#1. My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.
Abraham Verghese
#2. My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.
Chuck Palahniuk
#3. Make today the day you begin that awesome idea you have had for years. Now go, write this book, and remember that today is an important day in history.
M. Kirin
#5. Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
#6. Anything that distracts from the story you are trying to tell should be promptly and mercilessly dealt with.
Craig Hart
#7. People say that writers write for money. From my own experience that's not true. I write for me. I publish for money.
Greg Curtis
#8. If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Leo Tolstoy
#9. [G]ive nothing centrality, because writing is about continually shifting weight from one thing and moment to the other.
Amit Chaudhuri
#10. Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn't build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#11. When your novel first peeks its head into the world, it will look pretty much like every newborn: blotchy, hairless, and utterly confused.
Chris Baty
#12. Write the book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
Hilary Mantel
#13. Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.
William Strunk Jr.
#14. I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.
Stephen King
#15. As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:
genuine clarity
genuine feeling
the right word
the exact English sentence
the eloquent detail
the rigorous dramatization of story
Richard Yates
#16. If we are artists- hell, whether or not we're artists- it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn't have existed if not for the fire, the genetic mutation, the sick baby, the accident.
Dani Shapiro
#17. Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences.
John Searles
#18. My best advice for aspiring writers is to read a lot and write. Don't worry if you don't get your first, fifth or tenth novel published, if you keep going you'll make it. Also read "how to write" books as they may make the process a bit quicker.
Katie Fforde
#19. Read a ton, write every day if you can, and don't mimic another writer's style. Find your own voice.
James Patterson
#20. Developing your voice takes ...
time and practice.
Darynda Jones
#21. I have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.
Dean Koontz
#22. When you catch an adjective, kill it - perhaps the best possible advice for budding writers.
Mark Twain
#23. One of the things that put me off writing for a while was that piece of advice everybody gives new writers: 'Write what you know.' Nobody would ever want to read about my boring life! But I do know a lot of things about different societies' cultures and mythologies. The way people were and are.
Carol Berg
#24. I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: go to New York. And if you can't go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests.
Walter Kirn
#25. One, don't wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it's going?
Roger Ebert
#26. And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.
Darynda Jones
#27. Those Yalta nights, with extraordinary women who could drink vodka without swooning until six in the morning and sweaty young people from the Association of Proletarian Writers of Crimea who came to ask for literary advice at four in the afternoon.
Roberto Bolano
#28. My advice would be to write-never to stop writing, to keep it up all the time, to be painstaking about it, to write until you begin to write.
Gabriel Fielding
#29. I don't really have any advice for people who love each other and both happen to be writers, other than one of the two people in the couple better be slightly less in the clouds all day, or else you'll both starve to death. Humans really can't survive on just coffee alone, I don't think.
Tod Goldberg
#30. People say, 'What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?' I say, they don't really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they're gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.
R.L. Stine
#31. You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you.
Anais Nin
#32. Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
#33. I'm not talented or gifted. I'm a committed, meticulous workaholic. The only reason I succeed is because I refuse to fail.
Jessie Snow
#34. You will need seed money, so begin saving for your book. Don't give up. Also, write down the ideas that you have right away so you don't lose them.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#35. To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
#36. When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.
King Samuel Benson
#37. Because all writers are human beings first and writers second, my guess is that any advice for living with a writer is about the same as advice for living with a plumber or a refrigerator salesperson.
Clyde Edgerton
#38. Hone your writing skills as if they were your finest weapons of war. For in the literary arena, your pen will truly be your sword.
Max Hawthorne
#39. Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#40. Once, if you told people you were self-published, they'd look at you like you were a smelly old jobless hobo just come off a dusty boxcar with soupcan shoes and a hat made from a coyote skull.
Chuck Wendig
#41. Don't try to describe an orgasm if you've never had one.
Marty Rubin
#42. The divine thoughts comes from God, we are only vessel for its transmission.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#43. Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.
John Green
#44. People can't read a book if they don't know it exists. All authors need to do marketing, regardless of how they published.
Jo Linsdell
#45. The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
Nikki Giovanni
#48. Write for impact first, money second. If you do it the other way around, you'll end up with less of either.
Don Roff
#49. You never finish writing a novel, you eventually abandon it.
Tom Winton
#50. My advice to writers is this:
Walk, talk, breathe, laugh, cry, fall, rise, fail, succeed, run, jump, love, hate, hide, seek, learn, work, play, feel, LIVE.
Then write it down.
S. Alex Martin
#51. When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere. Which is how it should be.
John Banville
#52. Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.
Rudy Rucker
#54. It's better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.
Carla H. Krueger
#55. Writing a book with completely fictitious characters is like running a democracy, centered around a capital state. You constantly live with the fear & suspicion that one of the characters will start an uncontrollable rebellion.
Shomprakash Sinha Roy
#56. Cast a spell and the small flaws don't matter. (From Workbook)
Steven Heighton
#57. The three rules to writing a novel;
1) Write
2) Write more
3) Keep writing
Sci Furz
#58. Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.
Deana J. Driver
#59. Heinlein's Rules for Writers
Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold
Robert A. Heinlein
#60. Don't let your ego write checks your character can't cash.
another from the world of tweets
Robin Glasser
#61. There's just one advice for an aspiring writer; write.
Sci Furz
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