I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.
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Quotes tagged ‘Stephen King’
Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.
Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new unde…
But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.
Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.
If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Writing is seduction.
Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference.