Monday, April 27, 2015

on writing - the rarer wisdoms

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
- Elizabeth Bowen

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it,
all, right away, every time.  Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the
book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.  The impulse to save
something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.  Something
more will arise for later, something better.  These things fill from behind, from
beneath, like well water.  Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have
learned is not only shameful, it is destructive.  Anything you do not give freely and
abundantly becomes lost to you.  You open your safe and find ashes.
- Annie Dillard

By Jen Corace























Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you
have a believable character.
- Flannery O'Connor

It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly.
- C. J. Cherryh

It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
- L. P. Hartley

Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.
- Samuel Johnson

All the information you need can be given in dialogue.
- Elmore Leonard

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man
would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it,
will never become a great writer.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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