Top 100 Quotes About Beginning Writing
#1. I do labor - it's part of the process. Writing is no easier today than it was in the beginning: writing well is very hard to do. Always.
Nicholas Sparks
#2. I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.
Steve Earle
#3. When we started writing this kind of music in the beginning, I didn't think that many people would listen to it, but over the years our fan base just kept growing and growing. Now, it's like we do it for us and our fans.
Jeff Hanneman
#4. It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
Jonathan Franzen
#5. The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.
Charles Caleb Colton
#6. Me personally, I side more with punk rock bands. I grew up with The Misfits, The Dead Boys, The Damned, Dropkick Murphys, and early AFI. That was the stuff that really got me into music. Song writing wise, bands like Alkaline Trio were very important to me for beginning to write songs.
Andy Biersack
#7. 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
#9. I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.
Rose Tremain
#10. This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.
Walter Mosley
#11. At the beginning, I experienced writing as a sort of constraint. Starting so young as a writer is pitiable: it's beyond your powers; you have to lay bare things that are very heavy, and you don't have the means for that.
Patrick Modiano
#12. A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.
John Irving
#13. At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.
Bernard Cornwell
#14. Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.
Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.
Mary O'Hara
#15. You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
Victor Levin
#16. Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.
David Malouf
#17. I consider writing as a fine art. We kill it by imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning of learning.
Mahatma Gandhi
#18. The late Mavis Gallant told the Paris Review that writing is like "a love affair: the beginning is the best part. I write every day. It is not a burden. It is the way I live.
Mavis Gallant
#19. The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.
Jack Vance
#20. Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.
Kit Reed
#21. If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing. Then it's a constant spreading out of that five minutes.
Richard Price
#22. The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
V.S. Naipaul
#23. Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.
William Monahan
#24. Begin at the beginning as you understood it, proceed through the middle, continue to the end, and then stop, said Master Li, and he sauntered out to get drunk ...
Barry Hughart
#25. Foolish acts and bold adventures almost always appear, especially in the beginning, to be the absolute same thing.
Leigh Ann Henion
#26. I'm never sure if I'll ever write another song, what the song will be about and if what initially sparked the beginning of a song might complete it.
Tracy Chapman
#27. 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
#28. The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.
C.S. Lewis
#29. Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
Patrick White
#30. When you finally start to write something, do not let yourself stop ... even when you are convinced it's the worst garbage ever. This is the biggest caveat for beginning writers. Instead, force yourself to finish what you began, and THEN go back and edit it.
Jodi Picoult
#31. We really had the whole piece laid out in like a Word file, just from beginning to end. It was kind of more like your creative-writing class in school. You know, you have the outline and then you just kind of plug the stuff in the little map you've made.
Crowder
#32. This is what I wanted to do from the very beginning: write songs and make records and tour them with a good live band.
Christopher Owens
#33. At the beginning of a new project, often before I do any actual writing, I collect photos, quotes, song lyrics, and even objects that relate to the characters or the world I'm creating.
Kami Garcia
#34. I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.
Tony Gilroy
#35. Try to begin things you feel you can do. To begin is enough-there is a boldness in beginning. And in boldness lies genius and magic.
Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet
#36. The most enjoyable part in writing a series is being able to visit a world I have created and revisit old friends. The challenges are making the book fresh and new for readers who have started from the beginning while still adding old information for new readers.
Christine Feehan
#37. I already knew the next story that I was going to rewrite from the beginning. Mine.
Indu Muralidharan
#38. Here's what I love: I love sitting at my desk, staring at the blank screen, and beginning that conversation with my imaginary friends.
Brad Meltzer
#39. For all of my class projects, I somehow turned it into a commercial parody or put on plays. My whole thing was seeing things from a big picture, from beginning to middle to end: making a costume, doing voices, writing a script, making it all happen.
Noel Wells
#40. I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.
Alan Furst
#41. Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.
Stanley Schmidt
#42. A lot of the people I was writing with think a lot more about lyrics and a lot more about the details from the beginning. That kind of thinking made me a little self-conscious because I was suddenly having to judge what I was doing early on in the process.
St. Lucia
#43. I want to be remembered as an actor who put in some good work in the beginning of his career, even better work at the end of his career and slowly, successfully made the transition into writing and directing.
Jonathan Brandis
#44. Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
Peter Shaffer
#45. The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.
A. B. Yehoshua
#46. I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.
Ben Okri
#47. First you write down your goal; your second job is to break down your goal into a series of steps, beginning with steps which are absurdly easy.
Fitzhugh Dodson
#48. Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.
Rich Cohen
#49. It's as hard to get from almost finished to finished as to get from beginning to almost done.
Elinor Fuchs
#50. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
James A. Baldwin
#51. I knew that you couldn't make a living simply writing about the outdoors, so I made an effort from the beginning of my freelance career to write about other subjects.
Jon Krakauer
#52. At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'
Pete Hamill
#53. I advised Chambers, and would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy.
Samuel Johnson
#54. Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
Roland Barthes
#55. Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
Elizabeth Bowen
#56. I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!
Loudon Wainwright III
#57. Starting a new chapter is much like composing the perfect photograph. You must ensure the proper components are there. You may throw out the extra, but with out the key elements the story goes untold.
Faith Tilley Johnson
#58. The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.
Anna Quindlen
#59. I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.
Henry Miller
#60. Normally when I'm writing, in the beginning I don't think of lyrics at all. I'm just improvising.
St. Lucia
#61. From the beginning. I was a poem-writing child. I wrote little novels in my composition book when I was eight, nine years old.
Joan Larkin
#62. I feel like I'm still learning a lot with writing lyrics. In the beginning, like the first record, I wasn't so aware.
Yukimi Nagano
#63. A piece of writing is only worth doing if you're a different person at the end of the process than you were at the beginning.
Brian Morton
#64. For me, as an actor, the most challenging thing is creating the character in the beginning because you have to write their backstory. The easy part about doing a sequel is that you've done the film, so you already know their backstory.
Thomas Ian Nicholas
#65. I do not follow any tradition. I may stand at the beginning of one.
Avijeet Das
#66. You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.
Neil Gaiman
#67. Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#68. A story unwritten is without beginning or end. But in its potential lies another story; and in the heartbeat before pen meets page, both stories exist at once, reflecting endless permutations of the other, before one of them disappears forever.
Nenia Campbell
#69. My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love.
Mike Mills
#70. The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the Big Bang, in the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word.
John Green
#71. When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.
Ruth Ozeki
#72. I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.
Fred Brooks
#73. I started doing '30 Rock' and started writing 'Mystery Team' at the beginning of that. While I was doing 'Mystery Team,' I started practicing stand-up. While I was doing stand up, I got 'Community.' It's like I planted trees six years ago, and now they have fruit.
Donald Glover
#74. I've been writing lullabies since the beginning. I kind of did it for myself to help myself fall asleep when I really worried, like when I was homeless and I'd fall asleep in my car.
Jewel
#75. As long as I have questions and no answers I'll keep on writing. How do you start at the beginning, if things happen before they happen? If before the pre-prehistory there were already the apocalyptic monsters? If this story doesn't exist now, it will.
Clarice Lispector
#76. I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]
Vita Sackville-West
#77. Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, or blowing a horn, it's based on improvisation and spontaneity.
Van Morrison
#78. When I teach sketch writing, there's still a beginning, middle and end.
Jim Rash
#79. Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin
#80. I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I've been at it pretty much 50 years, and I'm now beginning to learn how to do the job well.
Harlan Ellison
#81. Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.
'That's how it's done,' he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.
Anita Diamant
#82. The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#83. I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a mistake.
Darryl Pinckney
#84. I believe in a new beginning. And so do many others out there - those writing on scraps to hang in the Gallery, those who continue to work hard to take care of the sick, those who dare to believe that we can all be the pilots of something new and better.
Ally Condie
#85. The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.
Aaron Sorkin
#86. The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#87. Nobody wanted me. I just kept writing books and learning my craft. Most writers aren't very good in the beginning.
Phyllis A. Whitney
#88. Just start at the beginning, you say? And what beginning might that be? I've come to the conclusion all starts are false ones. Tap the fragile shell of any beginning and you'll find another nested inside.
Christina Sunley
#89. So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.
Adam Kirsch
#90. I remember when I first started putting things on the web and people were writing about it. I totally didn't keep up with what was going on because I wanted to present stuff in museums and galleries and have some presence on the web. I feel fortunate to have posted stuff in the beginning.
Kalup Linzy
#91. An odd outlook on life is the beginning of good comedic writing.
Phil Vischer
#92. The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It's a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing.
James Salter
#93. I've been on the Web from the beginning of the Web. The good part about writing about technology is that you never run out of ideas, because it's changing so fast. The bad part is that it's changing so fast that there's a million new products and ideas every day and every week.
Walt Mossberg
#94. When I'm writing songs, I write visually. When I'm writing the words down and I listen to the melody and the lyrics, I start seeing the video form. And if I can get through a song and from the beginning to the end have the whole video in my mind, I think that's a great song.
Christian Kane
#95. I think sketch writing is a good spot for everyone to start because it requires you to develop characters, have a beginning, middle and end and have a bunch of jokes in a short amount of time.
Blake Anderson
#96. It ends when you're ready for a new beginning.
A.D. Posey
#97. My biggest dream from the beginning - besides Evanescence - is scoring film and writing music for film.
Amy Lee
#98. I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn't think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#99. When one writes "the last apple on the tree," or "the one small peach as pink as dawn," one is beginning to deal with particulars - to develop texture ...
Such texture is vital to all poetry. It is what makes the poem an experience, something much more than mere statement.
Mary Oliver
#100. In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
Ursula K. Le Guin
