One Word. Find it.

“Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it.  One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarisms, in order to dodge the difficulty.”

—Gene Fowler

Secret & Silent—Inspiration

“In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people’s lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.” 

― Marge Piercy, Braided Lives

Happy, & Now You Know It

“Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it’s a big deal to bow–or kneel or get knocked down–to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else’s. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.” 

― Patricia Hampl

What Goes In…Is What Comes Out

“To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and a book which could not in any sense be called improving. Read for fun for a change: superior Chicklit is good, or children’s classics. You are not allowed to try and analyse what the author is doing. After a good sleep, go and do something new, or that you haven’t done for a while….” 

― Lucy Sussex