Top 36 How To Start Writing Quotes
#1. People ask me how to start writing. I tell them that 'Creating Creates Creativity'. Put your notes and outline aside. Start with one anecdote or conversation, and that will lead to another and another. It's the steps, the path, not the final destination that drives the process or writing.
Dick Sederquist
#2. I still find the idea of a research-heavy or historical novel daunting. That's something I've had in mind for a while: like, would you research for a year and then start writing? I sit down, and I just don't know how to write it.
Lynn Coady
#3. If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.
Ann Patchett
#4. It's hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn't start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college.
Sara Zarr
#5. It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
Ernest Hemingway,
#6. I never smoke grass and drive my car because, for one thing, no matter how many letters I write to the road commissions, they still refuse to start designing highways with second-chance exits.
Arj Barker
#7. Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.
Grace Paley
#8. That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.
Dan Chaon
#9. To begin ... To begin ... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin.
Charlie Kaufman
#10. I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
Jacqueline Woodson
#12. I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.
Alan Moore
#13. When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it's a lineated or prose poem, but I don't think I can explain how. It's like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants.
Matthea Harvey
#14. Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn't sure how to start.
John Grisham
#15. You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that.
Damian Barr
#16. I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.
Daniel H. Wilson
#17. When you start to write, things begin to come into focus in a way they don't when you're not writing. It's a very good way to find out how much you don't know because you learn specifically what you need to know that you don't know at the moment by writing.
David McCullough
#18. Blank pages are cruel
Pure torture in white or beige
But how else to start
A.A. Patawaran
#19. You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'Write how you are but make it straight.
Ernest Hemingway,
#20. Dysfunctional co-dependent relationships always appeal to me. I don't know exactly how it started. I start writing sketches of characters and little scene-lets, and then it builds.
Elizabeth Meriwether
#21. Around age 18, I decided to start writing my own stuff. I wrote some bad short films and shot them. I tried to make them better and better. I slowly learned how to make movies, and I think I'm still learning.
Quentin Dupieux
#22. Write backwards. Start from the feeling you want the audience to have at the end and then ask "How might that happen?" continually, until you have a beginning.
Lucy Prebble
#23. I never really write the jokes. I just sit down over a week or two and try to figure out what I want to talk about. Once I narrow that down, then I start working on the material, like "How do I make this stuff funny?"
Chris Rock
#24. Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song.
Leon Bridges
#25. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#26. Work extra hard on the beginning of your story, so it snares reader's instantly. And know how you're going to end your story before you start writing. Without a sense of direction, you can get lost in the middle.
Joan Lowery Nixon
#27. I think there's something strange about writing a script I've written many, many scripts - dozens and dozens of scripts - and every time I start one, I think to myself: 'why in the world do I think I know how to do this?'
Brian Helgeland
#28. Returning to writing fiction after years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It's what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It's how I got my start as a writer.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#29. You don't need to know how a story ends, but how it begins. Start writing ... and the rest of the story will write itself.
Jason W. Blair
#30. Here's the million-dollar question: how are you going to write this book if you're afraid to start writing? Give your friend Doubt a name, and then block his calls.
Kami Garcia
#31. All writers start out writing badly, but with diligence and determination, we all get better. It's then that writing becomes truly fun and always engaging. When you no longer have to worry about how you write, you can start thinking about what to write.
Theo Fenraven
#32. During the course of the day, I write things down, things I don't do anything with. Then, when I get ready to start recording, I just look through my books and I see if I can find something that stands out. That's how I come up with the off-the-wall-kinda-strange-indirect-stuff.
Bootsy Collins
#33. I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.
Anne Tyler
#34. That's how I always try to start my thoughts. I write them down first, eventually it turns into a poem, and if I feel like composing something to it, then I do that.
Benjamin Clementine
#35. What is your suggestion for someone who wants to start writing? Be a reader. It's the only real way to learn how to tell a story.
Natalie Babbitt
#36. One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world.
Valerie Worth
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