Quotes About The Craft Of Writing

#1. Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.

Henry Petroski

#2. The best advice I can give to any aspiring author is to write every single day. Work at the craft of writing. Take it seriously.

Andrea Davis Pinkney

#3. That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

William Faulkner

#4. The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it's story, it's something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can't get rid of, and I've got to see it through.

Khaled Hosseini

#5. I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.

Eleanor Catton

#6. For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.

Alan Lightman

#7. I danced before I wrote. Everything my mentor, Marjorie Mussman, teaches about movement -- creating focus, taking chances, making an unequivocal statement -- is beautifully applicable to the craft of writing.

Jane F. Kotapish

#8. I'm sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn't make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering.

Rita Mae Brown

#9. The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.

John Steinbeck

#10. There's a difference between the 'art' of writing and the 'craft' of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.

Gerard De Marigny

#11. An unedited manuscript is a first draft of story; but is not a finished product. Too many writers study the craft of writing but do not acquire the skills of an editor.

Michael J. Kannengieser

#12. Many times, what people call 'writer's block' is the confusion that happens when a writer has a great idea, but their writing skill is not up to the task of putting that idea down on paper. I think that learning the craft of writing is critical.

Pearl Cleage

#13. Read. Read. Read. Read many genres. Read good writing. Read bad writing and figure out the difference. Learn the craft of writing.

Carol Berg

#14. Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.

Thomas Lennon

#15. I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about - police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

Michael Connelly

#16. It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.

Geoffrey S. Fletcher

#17. Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.

Robert Bringhurst

#18. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Madeleine L'Engle

#19. Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.

Alden Bell

#20. What draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

Lisa Cron

#21. The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.

Marcus Aurelius

#22. Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.

Jessica Lave

#23. The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.
(Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949)

Raymond Chandler

#24. A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.

Bill Johnson

#25. When you write your memoir you will understand, perhaps for the first time, the significance of your life through the language, images and emotions you craft from the memory.

Maureen Murdock

#26. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

#27. However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#28. What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape.

Fennel Hudson

#29. Writing is not magic. It's a craft, a process, a set of steps. As with any process, things sometimes break down. Even in a good story, the writer runs into problems. So the act of writing always includes problem solving.

Roy Peter Clark

#30. If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.

Arthur Plotnik

#31. You need to work at the craft of songwriting, but not only the craft. When I see people working both on themselves and the craft, and they combine those things ... I just go, That's just fabulous.

Fred Eaglesmith

#32. Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing.

Victor LaValle

#33. When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

Charles Baxter

#34. All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.

Roy Peter Clark

#35. The craft, the writing of a song, is about creating a story, a life story, a world within three minutes, but that's the frame, if you like, the picture frame. That fascinates me.

PJ Harvey

#36. If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.

Fennel Hudson

#37. 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.

Robert M. Pirsig

#38. The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow!

John Gaver

#39. One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.

Chloe Thurlow

#40. Today is the day that you create worlds, you change lives, you make a something, a someone, out of nothing.
Today is the day you become a writer.

Alessandra Torre

#41. The best lie is the one that has an element of truth, so it's good to include something real in your fiction.

Renee Conoulty

#42. You could say, in a way, that I'm not actually a writer, though perhaps I might be called a recorder? ... I just happen to be one of those holding the pen, that's all.

Etienne De L'Amour

#43. Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#44. I think if a writer is being honest they'd admit to a file full of a dozen or more stories that are all started to varying degrees. They're like the kid who wants to be a firefighter and a police officer and an astronaut.

Dan Alatorre

#45. The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

Elizabeth Bowen

#46. Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.

Naguib Mahfouz

#47. When I discovered music - when I discovered the craft of shaping a song - my being fell into place.

Charlotte Eriksson

#48. There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.

Aaron Allston

#49. But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

Elizabeth George

#50. Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

Rob Bignell, Editor

#51. Rejection sucks. It sucks every time, whether it's a big suck or a little suck. But it's part of the process. It's part of being a writer. It's a badge that says 'I'm serious about this, and I'm sending out my work.

Allison K. Williams

#52. Sometimes, I'll craft a scene that's so poignant; on the last keystroke I'll raise my hands high overhead and scream "Yes!" at the top of my lungs. I have yet to experience an orgasm so powerful and fulfilling.

Max Hawthorne

#53. Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you are just letting stuff seep in.

Stephen Dobyns

#54. For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.

Brett Armstrong

#55. In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

James Scott Bell

#56. The habits of craft, developed day in and day out over a working lifetime, create moments of astonishment, sublime and magical effects, precisely because the writer is not thinking overtly about making art.

Philip Gerard

#57. I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

Catherine Lowell

#58. You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit out of your reader.

Larry Correia

#59. Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

Edgar Allan Poe

#60. It's rare that I'm not at work on some sort of craft project. I've often enthused about the need to make things; how it employs a unique set of muscles - physical, intellectual, spiritual - that I can attain a state of flow when making something that I almost never can when writing.

David Rakoff

#61. The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination

Danielle M. Maistry

#62. You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

Michael Chabon

#63. Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

Stephen King

#64. If you've got craft, you got game. If you got game, you can write your way in and out of anything. Writing is the best gig in the whole business, as far as I'm concerned. It's the only job where you don't have to wait for someone to tell you what to do. You just sit down and make s**t up.

Robert Mark Kamen

#65. Learn from your rejections and polish your craft. Write for the sheer joy of being creative.

Jonathan Weeks

#66. I've come to the end of another book alive. At times like this I'm always at a loss for words.

Joe Coomer

#67. Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Bernard Cornwell

#68. I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone.

Shannon Celebi

#69. On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

Penelope Fitzgerald

#70. Don't expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.

Leslie Gordon Barnard

#71. My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess.

Gene Wolfe

#72. Doubt is the only reliable source of creativity.

Peter Tieryas

#73. The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from, and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.

Taiye Selasi

#74. A knowledge of craft is not the enemy of creativity. You sit down to write and realize, today's going to be a really unconscious day and I'm going to let it all out. Or, today's going to be analytical. And some days all mixed up.

K.M. Soehnlein

#75. I have even taught classes on writing about sex, and I've looked closely at different writers' sex scenes. On the level of craft I've given it a lot of thought. The pitfalls are simple: It can sound clinical or medical, which isn't right, or pornographic, because the characters disappear.

K.M. Soehnlein

#76. Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth.

Stella Atrium

#77. I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

Amy Tan

#78. If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

Pearl S. Buck

#79. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Ernest Hemingway,

#80. Backstory is like a flavour you can't quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it's there and it enhances the flavour, but it's intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly!

Sandy Vaile

#81. Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much?

Hannah Harding

#82. Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared ... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

William S. Wilson

#83. Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

Stephen King

#84. Every writer should know their target. Aim for the heart ~ hit that and all which follows is sheer ecstasy.

Muse

#85. [G]reat stories communicate simple truths that reflect the poetic dimensions of the human soul. Not only do powerful characters help us understand our lives, their stories reflect our core values as human beings.

Kate Wright

#86. Once you are truly seduced by profession of writing, you clock in one time ... and never clock out. You dwell in a creative space with the pure joy of embracing the very moment that mystifies others because no vacation is ever taken or desired. Perfecting your craft is your calm.

Carl Henegan

#87. There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

Stephen E. Ambrose

#88. But a writing project begins not just in doubt but also in faith-that if your passion is genuine, if you have mastered the elements of your craft, in the act of writing you will learn the rest of what you need to know in order to do justice to your subject.

Philip Gerard

#89. The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something, and you don't quite know what it is.

Sam Shepard

#90. The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words
not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable

Jacques Barzun

#91. The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.

William Zinsser

#92. I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

Ray Bradbury

#93. During 30 years of earning my daily bread as a writer I have learned many lessons about our craft. The most significant of those lessons is that I still have many lessons to learn about out craft.

H.P. Oliver

#94. God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.

Gerard De Marigny

#95. So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

Annie Dillard

#96. Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.

Ernest Hemingway,

#97. If you do not want to be forgotten as soon as you are dead...be read, or try coming back and pull the feet of those who are still alive instead!

Ana Claudia Antunes

#98. In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

Ray Bradbury

#99. Grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#100. All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls.

Aporva Kala