Tag: quotes
Educate Your Sense
“Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial…a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer.”
― James Kisner
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Fill in the Blank
“I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.”
― Harold Ross
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Finishing A Book…
“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”
– Truman Capote
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How trained are your writing muscles?
“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.”
– Jane Yolen
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Is writing hard work? Or magic?
“People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.”
– Harlan Ellison
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When to delete, to be complete
“My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.”
– Anton Chekhov
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Who Let the Characters Out?
“I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”
– Stephen King
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Hear MY WRITING roar!!!!
[found on us4.campaign-archive1.com; by Rachelle Gardner]
“Those Annoying Exclamation Points!!!
By Rachelle Gardner on Jul 01, 2013 09:34 pm
Over many years of editing books, it seems I have become a heartless eliminator of exclamation points!!! Seriously, I developed a hatred for them! People tend to WAY overuse them! Not to mention italics and bold, and that oh-so-effective use of ALL CAPS!!!!!!!
Here’s a hint to avoid coming across as amateur: Use the above devices sparingly in any writing intended for publication. (I’m being specific here, because in blog writing and emails, you’re free to go crazy. I do.)
If you tend to use a plethora of exclamation points, do a search-and-replace in your manuscript and put a period in place of every single one of them. Yep, every one. Then you can go back and add an exclamation point here and there if you really must. But I’m not kidding: VERY . . . SPARINGLY.
Same with other means of artificial emphasis: italics and ALL CAPS. Your writing should be so effective by itself that the emphasis isn’t necessary.
As for bold, don’t ever use it in running text! (It’s OKAY for headers!)
Isn’t THIS irritating??!!”
[found on http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=cde4992358f2badd71896ea0b&id=016b5771a7&e=325ff0e8d3]
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You want it? You do it.
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
Editing Addict, LLC 