#process

...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ... ↗

— John Geddes

#experience #memories #past #writing-craft #writing-process

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start." (Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975) ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#dialogue #writing #paris

The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent. ↗

— Val Kovalin

#writing-craft #writing-process #grammar

- But Abraham, you mean I'm supposed to make stuff up !?!? - You are creators, you make stuff up all the time! ↗

— Esther Hicks

#creative-process #loa #visualization #visualization

People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be. ↗

— Delphine de Vigan

#grammar

Writing is a struggle against silence. ↗

— Carlos Fuentes

#writing-process

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." (Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4) ↗

— David McCullough

#creative-process #precision #thinking #thought #writing

Don't write about Man; write about a man. ↗

— E.B. White

#the-writing-process #writing-process

My life will be the best illustration of all my work. ↗

— Hans Christian Andersen

#illustration #life #work #writing #writing-process

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#writing-process