The Craft Quotes

I tell everyone who asks me about writing...almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it's that 290 or so pages in between that are tough!

If you’re any good at all, you know you can be better.

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous

A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.

Marketing is the perfect blend or art and science. But more than that, marketing is a craft.

I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.

This is the secret to mastering any discipline: as you conquer one, you'll find it easier to tackle another.

In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said "It is the trade entering his body.

You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casual

Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abru

If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either

Don’t write what you know—what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you—and interests you deeply—and your readers will catch fire at your words.

Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick—then it’s personal. The bad guy isn’t just the “bad guy” anymore, he’s the BAD GUY!

If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.

Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.

If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.

The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?

From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet... technology progression yes... style?

...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

An idea for a story can be anything. The sky is not the limit, the limit is beyond it.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts.

It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing

What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) ... it's that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader's heart.

Doubt is the only reliable source of creativity.

A blank page is no empty space. It is brimming with potential... It is a masterpiece in waiting -- yours.

All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls.

Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

I don’t just want a gripping story line. I shoot for the three dimensional literary Braille to a silent Scorsese movie

... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...

The strewn and tangled wreckage that litters our lives is the precious raw material from which great beginnings are forged.

Every writer should know their target. Aim for the heart ~ hit that and all which follows is sheer ecstasy.

Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.

Champions realise that defeat - and learning from it even more than from winning - is part of the path to mastery.

Jeffrey Zeldman had an astonishing ability to craft a seductive coolness using educated references, dry humor, and retro/organic imagery.

Writing is a team sport.

Telling a story is like playing a fiddle. No one want's to hear it when it's done badly

We're not mad. We're inhabited

This whole show vs tell concept both bewilders and challenges my mind.

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie....

...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...

Writing is my oxygen. Music is my carbon dioxide.

Find the problem, find the story.

During 30 years of earning my daily bread as a writer I have learned many lessons about our craft. The most significant of those lessons is that I still have many lessons to learn about out craft.

Hands can cook, hands can create, hands can kill. There is no better tool than our hands.