“We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.”
— Stephen King
Tag: writer
Writer Spies
“The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.”
— Graham Greene
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Punctuation [semi] Outdone
Lynne Truss on punctuation:
“But colons and semicolons — well, they are in a different league, my dear! They give such lift! Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots . . . you stop.
But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes — that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity — well, they are the colons and semicolons.”
Truss’s book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, is an excellent resource for writers of all kinds. You can find it here.
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Grasping Resonant Symbols
“One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.”
— Christopher Nolan
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Write What You Want
Learn How to Rewrite
“I didn’t become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don’t just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.”
— Louis Sachar
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Best Author Will Be…
“The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
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A Good Writer
“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
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The Library Made Me Write
“I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.”
— Sandra Cisneros
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Frustrated Writer
“Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”
— Rod Serling
Editing Addict, LLC 