Writing Tips from the Experts
By Deb
A pithy quote from Nora DeLoach, which captured my imagination is this:
“Writing is rewriting… If you fall in love with the vision you want of your work and not your words, the rewriting will become easier.”
And from Earnest Hemingway I offer these quotes:
- “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
- “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
- “All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
- “The first draft of anything is sh*t.”
- “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
- “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
- “Never write about a place until you’re away from it, because that gives you perspective.”
- “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
- “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
- “I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
- “That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best –make it all up –but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”
- “From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?”
- “The great thing is to last and get your work done, and see and hear and understand and write when there is something that you know and not before and not too d*mn much afterwards.”
- “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
- “The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life -and one is as good as the other.”
- “You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.”
- “In order to write about life, first you must live it!”
- “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
- “When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.”
- “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse.”
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