#writ

Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories. ↗

— Daniel Keys Moran

#liars #memories #writers

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? ↗

— George Orwell

#writing #questions

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ↗

— Anais Nin

#say #unable #writer

Life's too short to be sat at home writing all the time. ↗

— Helen Hodgman

#life #life-s-too-short #writing #life

This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#life

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he. ↗

— William Carlos Williams

#experience

Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words — if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night — do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match? ↗

— C.J. Cherryh

#science-fiction #tennis #writing #science

The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate. ↗

— Paul Di Filippo

#writing #science

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves. ↗

— Paul Theroux

#nerves #pretty #writing

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more." ("The Castle") ↗

— Michael Connelly

#writing #writing-craft #perseverance