#writing

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin. ↗

— Victor J. Banis

#reading #writing #dreams

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. ↗

— Stephen King

#writing #time

All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. ↗

— Diane Setterfield

#dreams

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#language #nature #phenomenology #words #writing

Writing is one of the few careers for which you essentially train yourself, the other two major ones being juggling and pickpocketing. ↗

— Maureen Johnson

#career

My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do. ↗

— Walter Kirn

#writing #dreams

Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great... ...and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves. THAT is why you write fiction. ↗

— Holly Lisle

#inspirational #writing #writing-advice #dreams

If there's a will, there's a way! I feel larger than LIFE--and look up to the stars who shine down on me and have become my own personal cheerleaders....as my fingers tap on my computer late into the night.. ↗

— Donna Scrima-Black

#dreams #inspiration #writing #dreams

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#writing #dreams

I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.) for: the "Work" by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is accomplished only in and by writing. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#grief #mourning #writing #dreams