“I write simply so my hand can move, my thoughts move of their own accord. I write to kill a sleepless hour.”— Hjalmar Söderberg, amazon.com
“Paradoxically, vividness of description and detail here comes at the expense of realism. To put it simply, no one besides a writer—a professional noticer—notices this much, and certainly not in a near instantaneous time frame; not in a “taking in.” There is no reason to. This style of writing, which…”— Adam O'Fallon Price, blog.pshares.org
“As with writing, the silence says as much, or more, than the word.”— Adam O'Fallon Price, blog.pshares.org
“Description is, in fact, more useful for what it says about the noticer than the noticed.”— Adam O'Fallon Price, blog.pshares.org
“After Choire took over editing, I turned in 5,000 words of digressive psychobabble mixed with Kanye West lyrics, and his only feedback was “omg are you on Adderall?!?!””— Heather Havrilesky, thecut.com
“"Do you have a pen- I don't have a pen...Can you remember all my shit? Do you have a lipstick or something? A crayon?"”— Dane Cook, genius.com
“A lot of aspiring writers ask me about how much they should be writing per day. The answer, of course, is about half as much as you spend rolling on the floor and sobbing.”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“If you're having trouble writing fight scenes, I wholeheartedly recommend watching any Jackie Chan movie. Study not only how the choreography keeps things moving across a screen, but also how much emotion he conveys in a fight.”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“Something we don't talk about when it comes to worldbuilding is the power of NOT explaining something. Sometimes, just throwing out a word and letting the audience wonder what that could be is a good thing.”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“Writing a plot is super easy. First, think of a character. Then, think of what they want. Then, spend 600-odd pages keeping them from getting it.”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“Tonight I sat down to write and found nothing happening. This has happened to me ten thousand times before and no time has it ever been helped by berating myself, yet that's immediately what I did. It's weird how this job induces selective amnesia.”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“Ideally, every event in a book should serve a purpose. But it’s totally fine to write a scene because you want to and figure out its purpose later.”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“Tools for Writing: 1. Computer 2. Thesaurus 3. Shovel 3a. Hole you dig in your yard to escape the terror that your writing might simply be screaming into a void from which no sound, nor dream escapes 3b. None at all 4. Coffee or tea (gotta have that caffeine!)”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“This is ether a day for writing, the early stages of a honeymoon, or fifteen grams of opium. It’s raining, a very pretty rain, not the spasmodic kind that we get in California but a long steady one, the kind they show in the newsreels with the natives sitting on the rooftops with their cattle, wives…”— Groucho Marx, amazon.com
“The terrifying truth of the writing life: however many words you wrote last week, you still have to write a load this week.”— Joe Abercrombie, twitter.com
“Worldbuilding works when it's used to facilitate imagination. It doesn't work when it's used to stifle it. The goal is to make it seem like the world is alive and exists with or without you. When it's used as a gate to insist that certain things couldn't happen, then it no longer serves a purpose fo…”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“A novel has roughly six stages of 'done.' 1: 'I know how it ends, but not how to do it.' 2: 'I know how to do it, but haven't written it.' 3: 'I wrote it, but it sucks.' 4: 'I wrote it again, but it needs work.' 5: 'I finished the work, but I'm still not happy.' 6: 'good enough'”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“I always prefer writing about people. People grow, change and sometimes change back, but they remain persistently irritating and open-ended until they die. And sometimes afterward, too.”— Sam Sykes, twitter.com
“Writing is 98% hell, 1% finding the word you wanted without using a thesaurus at all, and 1% eating a snack in celebration of finding said word.”— rachel syme, twitter.com