Top 100 Writing Craft Quotes
#1. And when you clear away the cobwebs of the description of every job in the world, at the bottom of that job is service. It's service. And I took that ethic and applied it to my writing craft.
Adriana Trigiani
#2. Here's a writing craft tool that you can remove from your toolbox and throw away: description. It's the stuff that most readers skim. Even when deftly done using the five senses it's a lead weight. It isn't needed anymore.
Donald Maass
#3. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
William Goldman
#4. Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.
Robert Bringhurst
#5. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
Madeleine L'Engle
#6. Half the rhymes you write, you're saying that you're better than the other MC. That's how we keep the craft sharp.
Ice-T
#7. I have this idea that writing is all about divergent thinking colliding with a hurricane of emotions.
R. YS Perez
#8. 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
#9. It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Robert Hass
#10. It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.
Seeley James
#11. the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
Stanley Fish
#12. Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!
Stella Atrium
#13. I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.
Ernest Hemingway,
#14. People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.
Michelle M. Pillow
#15. Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.
Henry Petroski
#16. 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
#17. Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.
Jennifer Hudson Taylor
#18. Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick - then it's personal. The bad guy isn't just the "bad guy" anymore, he's the BAD GUY!
Michael J. Sullivan
#19. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.
Neil Gaiman
#20. The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.
Marcus Aurelius
#22. 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
#23. So I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.
Stephen King
#24. Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.
Dan Alatorre
#25. And above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. There are other trades which you can take up: make boots, not books.
Marquis De Sade
#26. 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
#27. Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
Witold Gombrowicz
#28. Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?
Chang-rae Lee
#29. 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
#30. 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
#33. 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
#35. You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.
Rick Aster
#36. ... Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done - so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.
Ernest Hemingway,
#37. 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
#38. You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."
("The Castle")
Michael Connelly
#39. I personally believe that one learns to write by writing.
Jack Jordan
#40. However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#41. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#42. 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
#43. Good writing ain't necessarily good reading.
Ken Kesey
#44. Writing is a craft never mastered.
I.O. Neil
#46. 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
#47. Don't write what you know - what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you - and interests you deeply - and your readers will catch fire at your words.
Valerie Sherwood
#48. Talent is required, but much of writing is a matter of craft, which develops with time, attention, patience and practice, like playing an instrument or learning to dance.
Susan Wiggs
#49. One of my favorite things to do is to craft and to write songs and tell stories, and another thing is to really just flip out basically, and release kind of my unruly energies.
Eugene Hutz
#50. Suspense doesn't always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story.
Sandy Vaile
#51. If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.
Arthur Plotnik
#53. Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.
Robert Dugoni
#54. I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.
Stephen J. Cannell
#55. That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.
William Faulkner
#56. I was learning the craft; I didn't study writing in school. Rejection was my motivation, and failure is what taught me.
Pierce Brown
#57. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#58. 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
#59. I just started to understand my craft, what I wanted to do as an artist. It's just a growing process. Figuring out exactly what I wanted to do and obviously I toured a whole bunch. I did a lot of song writing for other people and then just settled back into my zone.
Young De
#61. Inspiration surrounds us, the creation is our responsibility as artists.-Lyn Crain
Lyn Crain
#62. Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing.
Victor LaValle
#63. Embrace the melancholic voice completely in the drafting stages, to explore it for all it's worth. Then, in revision, privilege craft over pure feeling. Write the work that someone besides you will want to read.
David Starkey
#64. You need to understand that a skilled professional songwriter can accelerate your success as an already talented musician. These people are writing every single day, so their craft is really sharp, and it's the best songwriters who consistently get on the radio.
Kara DioGuardi
#65. Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.
Shannon Celebi
#66. A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.
Roman Payne
#67. Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!
Avijeet Das
#68. Writing is a master craft in the finest art,
the loneliest profession in the most social science,
the most influential medium in the toughest industry,
yet is the most under-rated profession.
Grant McLachlan
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Where do writers get their ideas from? Anywhere and everywhere.
Nothing is sacred.
Darynda Jones
#73. 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
#74. Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
Rachel Kushner
#75. Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.
Kim Edwards
#76. 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
#77. There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
Umberto Eco
#78. I'm still learning my craft, and I've been writing since I was nine.
Kage Baker
#79. All great movies have one thing in common: every frame of every scene could stand alone as a work of art. Why should it be different in a book?
Sean Hinn
#80. The only way to learn and hone your craft is by working hard and writing regularly.
Darren Shan
#81. Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.
Gillian Marchenko
#82. Every artist needs canvass, mine just happens to be Microsoft Word and a Thesaurus.
Lori Lesko
#83. 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
#84. Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.
Lisa Cron
#85. What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.
Stephen King
#86. Writer's block? I've never heard of a plumber complain about plumber's block.
Robert B. Parker
#87. 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
#88. One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.
Chloe Thurlow
#89. 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
#90. Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.
Janet Burroway
#92. 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
#93. An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.
Chris Everheart
#94. I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
Dorothy Allison
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.
Courage Knight
#98. The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking.
Allan Lokos
#99. 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
#100. The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.
Elizabeth Bowen
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