Quotes About The Process Of Writing

#1. Thinking about writing isn't writing. Planning to write isn't writing. Neither is talking about it, posting about it, or complaining how hard it is. These may be part of the process. But only writing is writing.

Jack Ketchum

#2. I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.

Tess Gerritsen

#3. If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.

David Benioff

#4. This isn't a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It's a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it's printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.

Chila Woychik

#5. Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

Jaclyn Moriarty

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

Madeleine L'Engle

#7. Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.

Paul Di Filippo

#8. Art is the overflow of emotion into action.

Brian Raif

#9. The challenge of the writer is to transform - artistically and imaginatively - a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.

Hillel F. Damron

#10. The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do ... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

Donald Barthelme

#11. Set fire to cities and nations, to hearts and minds, to the very core of every human spirit. Make sure your words seep into the skin of the reader, leaving trace minerals that sustain the ailing human shell. Make them pay attention. Set fire to the soul. Anything less is an abomination to creation.

Susan Marie

#12. Writers are always alone, even in a room bursting with noises of the familiar.

Rachel Thompson

#13. Attempting to express a person's objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#14. I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

Stephen King

#15. I enjoy the process of writing. The torment comes in getting my bottom on the chair and in front of the typewriter.

Caryl Rivers

#16. I always dread the process of writing because I'm not a writer. I'm an audible guy, I'm a verbal guy. I love to talk. I write a book every couple years, but it just takes everything out of me to get a book out.

T.C. Boyle

#17. I love stand-up, but the process of writing is a little more lonely. I want to keep doing both, though.

Jack Whitehall

#18. My stories take three or four months to fix, and it's not magical of a process. Ultimately it's a boring, difficult process. I write everything out, and then the parts I think are funny I put in bold. Then I go perform it. Then the parts that aren't funny, I unbold them.

Kumail Nanjiani

#19. More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

M.V. Carey

#20. Thinking is creating with God, as thinking is writing with the ready writer; and worlds are only leaves turned over in the process of composition, about his throne.

Henry Ward Beecher

#21. If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.

Eddie Vedder

#22. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.

Carla H. Krueger

#23. To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant - inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.

Daniel Dennett

#24. The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.

Diane Johnson

#25. The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It's a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I'm writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I'm actually there and doing the writing.

Barry Eisler

#26. Writing is the act of finding out what I think.

Stephen King

#27. Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.

Patti Smith

#28. My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.

Kathe Koja

#29. In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.

C. G. Jung

#30. I really enjoy the writing process because I can do it from my house. I can create these characters and take them in the different directions that I want to take them. You have a lot of freedom as a writer.

Ricky Schroder

#31. I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

Barbara Kingsolver

#32. I'm very keen. Adaptations of other people's work, too. I got fascinated by the adaptation process, so I think that'd be a really interesting task. I would happily write original screenplays as well. I think it's become one of my favorite genres.

Emma Donoghue

#33. I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

Melody Carlson

#34. This is not necessarily the answer people want, but ultimately, I think writing is an amoral process. Your ultimate responsibility is to the truth of the story you're trying to tell.

Lynn Coady

#35. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.

Virginia Woolf

#36. I loved the process of writing.

Nora Roberts

#37. But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?

Stephen King

#38. Reflective writing produces distinct rewards. A writer does not claim to live exclusively in the moment. A pensive writer retreats into oneself in noble attempt to meld memory, thought, faith, doubt, and other strong emotions into thought capsules while exploring the inscrutable web of creation.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#39. The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

George Saunders

#40. How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

Tracy Kidder

#41. To write is to feel the dance of your soul swirling in a dream that drips imagination onto paper.

DiAnn Mills

#42. The writing process is sort of like when you've got no electricity and you've gotten up in the middle of the night to find the bathroom, feeling your way along in the dark. I can't hardly tell you what I do because I really don't know.

Carolyn Chute

#43. I felt differently about her [Gypsy Rose Lee] during every phase of the research and writing process. Often, I felt incredibly sorry for her; she had an extremely difficult childhood and a complicated 'to say the least' relationship with her family, her mother especially.

Karen Abbott

#44. It's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...

John Geddes

#45. 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

#46. The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.

Claudia Bakker

#47. For Christians who desire to write, the call to read broadly is an absolute necessity, for writing is, in many ways, the process of digesting and synthesizing not only the thoughts and experiences of a writer's own life, but the writer's intellectual wanderings as well.

Gene C. Fant Jr.

#48. Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.

Anita Shreve

#49. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]

Helen Dunmore

#50. Composing is a natural fit. As far as the creative process goes, I'd rather do this than anything else, by far. Something different happened to me when I started to write music to images. It was a feeling of excitement and connection and a sense of being in the right place that I never had before.

James Newton Howard

#51. When I write, it feels like there are two little creatures that sit on each of my shoulders. One whispers, "You can do this. You've got what it takes." The other sounds like my mother-in-law.

Carla H. Krueger

#52. The changes are part of my writing process. When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.

Pawel Pawlikowski

#53. But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

Dani Shapiro

#54. Writing can be a lifeline, especially when your existence has been denied, especially when you have been left on the margins, especially when your life and process of growth have been subjected to attempts at strangulation.

Micere Githae Mugo

#55. Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you.

Charles Ghigna

#56. Writing is really freeing because it's the only part of the process where it's just you and the characters and you are by yourself in a room and you can just hash it out. There are no limitations.

Dee Rees

#57. The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

Karen Joy Fowler

#58. The reason why people think of programming as being hard is because you're writing down a general rule which is going to be used for lots of instances that a particular instance must process correctly.

Gerald Jay Sussman

#59. I think my writing process changes as I gain more life experience ... It has taken me many years to be able to write a novel that shows the points of view of people of different ages and personalities.

Kathleen Winter

#60. And I've learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity.

Benjamin Kane Ethridge

#61. All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.

Tom Stoppard

#62. 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

#63. I think any music of any worth has been done by people who were very interested in the internal process of their soul and their mind that's taking place while they're writing music.

John Frusciante

#64. I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.

Quentin Tarantino

#65. I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.
[Interview clip in the In Memoriam section of the 85th Academy Awards ceremony, Feb. 24, 2013]

Nora Ephron

#66. The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful

Monica Ali

#67. One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

Natalie Goldberg

#68. I'm constantly being surprised and finding unplanned things - because the writing is a process of experiencing things on the ground with the characters.

Michelle Paver

#69. Learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job o fa creative person ... Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#70. The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.

Geoff Dyer

#71. When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

Umberto Eco

#72. Writing, like any art, is a continuing process of discovering the infinite possibilities of Life.

Hubert Selby Jr.

#73. I started blogging a decade ago because I like blogging. Writing's a kind of lonely thing to do, and I liked the idea of demystifying the process because I loved it as a kid and teenager and as somebody who wanted desperately to write.

Neil Gaiman

#74. Anxiety is not only an inevitable part of the writing process but a necessary part. If you're not scared, you're not writing.

Ralph Keyes

#75. I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

Farley Mowat

#76. I think writing is really a process of communication ... It's the sense of being in contact with people who are part of a particular audience that really makes a difference to me in writing.

Sherley Anne Williams

#77. There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.

Darynda Jones

#78. Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one.

Tara Moss

#79. I would love to produce a film. I have written a script and am in the process of writing another, so maybe it will happen down the road. I would love to do a film in Africa.

Judi Shekoni

#80. I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.

M.V. Carey

#81. The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.

Sahara Sanders

#82. I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet.

L.M. Fields

#83. My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you're not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You're actually discovering in the writing process, you're actually creating knowledge.

Alan Lightman

#84. I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.

Dean Koontz

#85. Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world.

Alan Moore

#86. The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

Martin Amis

#87. You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it's really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.

Diane Setterfield

#88. I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place.

David Cook

#89. I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.

William Zinsser

#90. I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a
painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex. - 1946

Henri Matisse

#91. If you haven't heard a rumor by noon, make one up. If you're a writer, make sure it's a full page of the book you're currently working on.

Lamont Tanksley

#92. Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen.

Russell T. Davies

#93. Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.

Gudjon Bergmann

#94. As a writer I have to find platforms that can use this writing process. The internet is one of them.

Paulo Coelho

#95. I do read very, very quickly. I do process data very quickly. And so I write very quickly. And it is embarrassing because there is a conception that the things that you do quickly are not done well. I think that's probably one of the reasons I don't like the idea of prolific.

Jackie French

#96. Writing is still a bit of a miracle - the whole process: I see the world, filter the world, write down abstract squiggles on a page which somebody is then able to connect with. I'm still amazed by it and think I always will be.

Rebecca Miller

#97. If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.

George Saunders

#98. The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.

Cynthia Ogren

#99. For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#100. The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself

Dorothy L. Sayers