The Writing Process Quotes

#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. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

William Goldman

#5. Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.

Stephen L. Carter

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Madeleine L'Engle

#9. 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

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

Brian Raif

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

Hillel F. Damron

#12. The writing process for me is pretty much always the same - it's a solitary experience.

Sheryl Crow

#13. For me,the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form,because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing,the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.

Gunter Brus

#14. I tend to write songs fast, so the process usually only lasts around 30 minutes. In the studio is where I really can artistically breathe, and let my ideas flow.

Alan Cohen

#15. 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

#16. It's all just so fraught when you're writing and then going through the editorial process. It feels like this shape-shifting thing. When it's done, and you can't change a single word, it's a totally different thing. I was surprised by what that thing was.

Danielle Dutton

#17. If we were truly in the studio making a record, it would have been more time consuming, and certainly I would have been more involved in the writing process.

Taylor Dayne

#18. Basically, editing is done in rehearsal and in the writing process and in the acting, so it's very, very tricky, very, very tricky.

Julie Delpy

#19. The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

Chris Stapleton

#20. 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

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

Rachel Thompson

#22. I'm not talented or gifted. I'm a committed, meticulous workaholic. The only reason I succeed is because I refuse to fail.

Jessie Snow

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Caryl Rivers

#26. Writing music is really personal, and it's a really exciting thing to participate in because represents the full creative process: It feels like something is coming from nothing.

Zooey Deschanel

#27. It's amazing how my mind opens up right when I have to run on the treadmill. I've finished three chapters rather than run a mile.

Dan Alatorre

#28. 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

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

Jack Whitehall

#30. The thing I've learned is that thinking is not writing.

Erica Lorraine Scheidt

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.

Kate Braverman

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

Diane Johnson

#39. 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

#40. It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.

Maira Kalman

#41. The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you've already got.

Julia Cameron

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

Stephen King

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.

P.D. James

#46. 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

#47. In all honesty, I've written movies that have been made, and the process has not been as satisfying as writing for television.

Vince Gilligan

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. You have to stop and freeze the moment," he told me I had told her. "You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.

Jenny Hubbard

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. I loved the process of writing.

Nora Roberts

#56. When Kirk dies it was very emotional and very strange, in the moment and all the way through the process. I'd read it in the script and I'd always be struck by what I'd just done and what we were doing, and that this was my childhood hero and I was writing his death.

Ronald D. Moore

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

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

DiAnn Mills

#62. 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

#63. 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

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

John Geddes

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. Dedicating a writing session to someone is like sending a prayer for them out into the world. I will never know if my writing, my dedication to them, my prayer for them made any difference in their lives. But I know it makes a difference in mine.

Elizabeth Rusch

#68. 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.

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. I enjoy the song writing process more than anything. It's what I like the most, just sitting in my room with guitar or at the piano or something. Just making something up, something that's not there, that suddenly is there.

Bernard Fanning

#72. 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

#73. Since I tend to write chronologically, the middle is always the place where the process is most taxing.

Robert Paul Weston

#74. 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

#75. I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...

John Geddes

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Flannery O'Connor

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

Charles Ghigna

#81. 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

#82. For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.

Chad Harbach

#83. 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

#84. I had kids at age 47, and very late in life, and I'd been doing it for 30 straight years, writing songs, making a record and touring and starting the process right over.

Bob Seger

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

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

Monica Ali

#94. Don't have the veins bulging in your biro.

Seamus Heaney

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

Natalie Goldberg

#96. If you have a story inside you but don't know where to start, look within and write from the heart, for the heart will never steer you wrong.

Shanda Trofe

#97. The secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...

John Geddes

#98. For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want to know what happens next.

Neal Asher

#99. 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

#100. 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