“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’”— Maya Angelou, amazon.comTagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Muse, Art
“Put it aside for a few days, or longer, do other things, try not to think about it. Then sit down and read it (printouts are best I find, but that’s just me) as if you’ve never seen it before. Start at the beginning. Scribble on the manuscript as you go if you see anything you want to change. And of…”— Neil Gaiman, journal.neilgaiman.comTagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity
“I encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written, three hundred words of memories or dreams or stream of consciousness on how much they hate writing — just for the hell of it, just to keep their fingers from becoming too arthritic, just because they have made a commitm…”— Anne Lamott, amazon.comTagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity
“I’ve never worked a day in my life. I’ve never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: ‘Am I being joyful?’ And if you’ve got a writer’s block, you can cure it this evening by stopp…”— Ray Bradbury, brainpickings.orgTagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”— Mark Twain, bloomberg.comTagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will w…”— Ernest Hemingway, medium.comTagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity
“Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on.…”— Orson Scott Card, fictionfactor.comTagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity
“Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to…”— Norman Mailer, amazon.comTagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity
“I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.”— Barbara Kingsolver, amazon.comTagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”— Philip Roth, amazon.comTagged: Writer's Block, Creativity, Art, Writing, Hell
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”— George Orwell, orwell.ruTagged: Writer's Block, Creativity, Art, Writing, Books