Don Roff Quotes

It's my belief that people enter your life at exactly the right time.

But people in a small town tend to do a lot of talking, even when they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode.

A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.

The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.

Any conversation including the mention of Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, or Emily Dickinson is one worth getting into or at least eavesdropping.

A writer always writes.

Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.

There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin; the second is never to finish.

Always work with/surround yourself with people who help make you a better version of you. Kindly avoid those who don't.

Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere.

Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.

Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.

Fear and self-doubt are the deadly enemies of creativity. Don’t invite either into your mind.

Love it when a compelling new character kicks open your mental door, tracks mud across your brain, and props their feet up on your cerebrum.

When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.

It’s hard to land a devastating jab/cross/hook/uppercut combo to your reader’s imagination when you’re telegraphing your punches.

A migraine is the cockblock of writing.

You can be a writer who doesnt read everyday. But youre not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.

Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.

Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.

I don't use big words to show off because it's ostentatious.

Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat—chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange.

Write for impact first, money second. If you do it the other way around, you’ll end up with less of either.

Mothman flew away from town, like a giant bat, and then disappeared from sight behind a thicket of skeletal autumn trees.

Audiences will admire your character’s strength but connect with them through their weakness.

Keep being bold on the page, and in life, and people cannot ignore you forever.

You cannot write your character until you know how he or she thinks, until you know what their philosophy is in the world that they occupy.

I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.

You're never as good a writer as you think you are, and you're never as bad. Just keep reading and writing, writing, writing.

If you write a kid's book only for kids, then you have failed.

Creativity and intelligence, rather than violence, are the best problem solvers.