writing-craft

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

I'm my characters' galley slave.

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.

Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match....One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.

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

You are not an "author," you are a writer. If your books are still selling like hotcakes ten years after your demise, THEN you're an author.

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

People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.

At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her.Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse's power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.

On working with other writers: You develop honesty and you can then ask the really embarrassing questions. I have learned so many things I didn__ want to know, and they were all a result of interesting interviews for background information.

The paradox of writing is that you__e trying to use words to express what words can__ express.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

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

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

Sixteen unseeing stone of disheveled male slammed into her; Robin was knocked off her feet and catapulted backwards, handbag flying, arms windmilling, towards the void beyond the lethal staircase.

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive

Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.