Top 100 Quotes About Writing Your Story
#1. Yes, it was scary, but every time I got a frisson of fear I tried to remember what Frank Quinn was always telling me. "Susan, believe in yourself. You are the person writing your story.
Susan Boyle
#2. You can hope all you want for a happy ending, but sometimes, like it or not, the guy writing your story is working on a tragedy; you may not even be the main character.
Shalom Auslander
#3. Be expectant ... God is not finished writing your story!
Joy Marino
#4. Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
Bill Moyers
#5. Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
(advicetowriters)
George V. Higgins
#6. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.
Dana Brunetti
#7. If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#8. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
Salman Rushdie
#9. You and you alone are the only person that can live the life that writes the story that you were meant to tell. And the world needs your story because the world needs your voice.
Kerry Washington
#10. You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
Anne Enright
#11. Search your own life for the story only you can tell. The best thing about writing from life is that you can be sure of using original material. And no research is needed beyond the time you spend looking deep inside your own heart.
Elizabeth Held Forsyth
#12. Let your story grow. Let it surprise you, and it will certainly surprise your readers.
M. Kirin
#13. Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#14. I keep the description basic as it allows you to mould the story around your life.
Airam
#15. Never submit an idea or chapter to an editor or publisher, no matter how much he would like you to. Writing from the approved idea is (another) gravely serious time-waster. This is your story. Try and find out what your editor wants in advance, but then try and give it to him in one piece.
John Creasey
#16. The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.
Victor LaValle
#17. I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer is to follow your initial [writing] plan too stringently. A story needs room to grow and evolve.
Patrick Rothfuss
#18. Your life should reflect your heart.
A.D. Posey
#19. Writing the opening lines of a story is a bit like starting to ski at the steepest part of a hill. You must have all your skills under control from the first instant.
Marion Dane Bauer
#20. Love is the key to everything. Love your life.
A.D. Posey
#21. I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.
David Levithan
#22. Your best authorial self is always one about to ruin the story.
Chuck Wendig
#23. Stop beating yourself up over all the days you didn't work on your story. Focus on what you can do today.
Sit down, and write.
M. Kirin
#24. 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
#25. When you were born, did your parents shove a book of world history in your face? No, absolutely not. They gave you what you could handle, and that's exactly how you need to treat the reader.
A.J. Flowers
#27. Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.
C.K. Webb
#28. Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.
Brenda Ueland
#29. 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
#30. You have to live your story before being able to write your story.
Amy Shearn
#32. To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.
Langston Hughes
#33. Let your story breathe and be what it really is.
A.D. Posey
#34. For me, that emotional payoff is what it's all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story ... or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.
Stephen King
#35. Your story must told.
Live a life legacy- written book or notes.
This will be there for many generations to know your rich experiences and knowledge.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#36. God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings - not dummies! Be personal - be prejudiced - be catty - be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards!
Agatha Christie
#37. Surround yourself with those conducive to you being your highest self.
A.D. Posey
#38. If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.
Matt Damon
#39. 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
#40. With the story of your life, you dont get to write the whole book, just your character.
Olivia Munn
#41. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
Elizabeth McCracken
#42. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
Anne Enright
#43. When you choose to write using yourself as the source of the story, you are choosing to confront all the silences in which your story has been protectively wrapped. Your job as a writer is to respectfully, determinedly, free the story from the silences and free yourself from both.
Christina Baldwin
#44. Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
William Kittredge
#45. If something isn't working, if you have a story that you've built and it's blocked and you can't figure it out, take your favorite scene, or your very best idea or set-piece, and cut it. It's brutal, but sometimes inevitable.
Joss Whedon
#46. 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
#48. I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma ... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Toni Morrison
#49. 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
#50. Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.
Ashly Lorenzana
#51. Voice really depends on the answer to the question, Who is telling this story? ... That will color your diction-and determine your metaphors, your sensibility.
Philip Gerard
#52. It's all still about having a good story. You have to have a good story as your anchor, as your main focus. So for me, personally, I just like to concentrate on writing the best book I can, and if there's other stuff that goes along with it, that's awesome, as long as the story is central.
Rick Riordan
#53. I knew now there was no such thing as a biblioblackhole.
Everything written truly lived.
Every real word. Every real story.
You had to find your words. You had to find your story.
Tarun J. Tejpal
#54. Music, I find, gets you out of a trap [when screenwriting], because it speaks to your emotions directly, it's an abstract thing, it's not concerned with plot or story. And so music really helps - often I'll listen to the music and just write anything, just to get through.
Tony Grisoni
#55. You can be the world's greatest hero or its most mild-mannered citizen, but the only person who can write your story ... is you.
Jonathan Kent
#56. You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, 'This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone!
Christy Hall
#57. Today is your wright-time. Anything worth writing will be, or has been written already. A great story chooses its writer lest no wright should boast. Just write! If you don't, you will come right in contact with your thoughts someplace soon.
Amah Lambert
#58. When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.
Morgan Neville
#59. Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.
Charles Stross
#60. I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it ... .By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you ... .Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
Margaret Atwood
#61. Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting.
Edna Ferber
#62. Surely the whole point of writing your own life story is to be as honest as you possibly can, revealing everything about yourself that is most private and probably most interesting for that very reason.
Judith Krantz
#63. If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can.
Neil Gaiman
#64. If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.
Robert McKee
#65. I believe that everybody needs to tell their story - to be heard, to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be understood. We all want that, deep down inside - and writing a book is a great way to make sense of your own experience and to share it with others.
Shakti Gawain
#66. The last story you should write is the most important story. You should start with a story that is just an amusing, entertaining, fun story to write and learn your writing chops with the least important things before you start applying them to the most important things.
Chuck Palahniuk
#67. Make up a story ... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
Toni Morrison
#68. The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!
Ford Madox Ford
#69. First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea, to reform it ... Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud
#70. A pen is never worthless. In the right hand, it holds a whole world and all the treasures you could ever want. Now write your story. All of it.
Ian Baucom
#71. Write because you love it, not because you want to become rich. Your story will be better for it.
Lana Axe
#72. This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.
Philip Pullman
#73. I think striking the right tone for your story is, if you like, the alchemical work of writing.
Julia Leigh
#74. Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker ... [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?
Shirley Jackson
#75. 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
#76. ... writing is about developing the capacity to expose yourself on the page, if not your life story at the very least your prevailing anxieties and the people who caused them.
Steve Almond
#77. In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.
Jefferson Smith
#78. The process of writing a story isn't about fair. It's about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong.
Lynn Coady
#79. In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.
Alan Moore
#80. Improvise. Write your own damn story.
Eric Lange
#81. Fate is a story that's been written for you by somebody else. By your parent's genes, by what happened to you when you were a child, by your culture, by the fact that you were born a man or a woman. Destiny is a story that you write.
Alberto Villoldo
#82. You are writing the story of your only life every single minute of every day.
Katherine Center
#83. Write truthfully, write from the heart, and your words will live.
A.D. Posey
#84. This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it.
Don DeLillo
#85. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky ... more will want to do the former than the latter.
Stephen King
#86. Violence can read like poetry. You just have to describe the act as if you're in love with the way your characters bleed.
F.K. Preston
#87. Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go places and travel through time.
A.A. Patawaran
#88. Most games follow a real railroad plot, no matter what you want, you're following their storyline to its unavoidable conclusion. I'd like to write a game where your character can follow any number of possible story arcs and sub-plots.
Patrick Rothfuss
#89. Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself.
A.D. Posey
#90. You can't write your life story and leave out one of the most important things that happened to you in your life. I think that that would be dishonest, and it would be something people would be very angry about.
Kris Jenner
#91. When writing the story of your life, don't let anyone else hold the pen.
Annisa Widi Astuty
#92. Don't be afraid to write and share your story with the reading world! Find your courage! It is a fact that some will love it and some will hate it, but there will always be at least one reader who needed it and that's all that matters!
S.L. Morgan
#93. Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.
Edwidge Danticat
#94. Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don't simply read a story and copy it.
I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.
Clive Barker
#95. Your experiences are the foundation for your story; your imagination takes it from there.
J.R. Young
#96. It's a funny thing about writing. You get so balled up in a story idea that you lose your perspective and forget that human being might read your words someday.
Gary Reilly
#97. The vital point to remember is that the swine who just sent your pearl of a story back with nothing but a coffee-stain and a printed rejection slip can be wrong. You cannot take it for granted that he is wrong, but you have an all-important margin of hope that might be enough to keep you going.
Brian Stableford
#98. The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
[Keynote Address, University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)]
Neil Gaiman
#99. 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
#100. Screw the beaten path! Do your thing. Write the best story you can. the rest will fall into place.
Darynda Jones
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