TIPS FROM AUTHORS
G'day folks,
Today I feature some practical tips from a group of established authors. Hope they help you writers and authors.
“I have advice for people who want to
write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are
important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest,
unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put
down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is
fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a
writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to
write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if
it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write.” ― Madeleine
L’Engle
“Let the writer take up surgery or
bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get
the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a
theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The
good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has
supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat
him.” ― William Faulkner
“Read Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the
tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write
first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best
thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the
inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t really need
any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, “how to” books seldom
do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing
exercise.” ― Hilary Mantel
“Start telling the stories that only you
can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll
always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much
better at doing this or doing that – but you are the only you.” ― Neil
Gaiman
“Becoming a writer is about becoming
conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and
simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the
lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth
in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the
terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.” ― Anne
Lamott
“I am always chilled and astonished by the
would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they
“don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying
that he didn’t have time to buy any rope or pitons.” ― Stephen King
“You either have to write or you shouldn’t
be writing. That’s all.” ― Joss Whedon
“Advice to young writers who want to get
ahead without any annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about a
man.” ― E.B. White
“Write. Start writing today. Start writing
right now. Don’t write it right, just write it –and then make it right later.
Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of
writing is a long one. Be wary of “writing rules” and advice. Do it your
way.” ― Tara Moss
“Notice how many of the Olympic athletes
effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my
practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing.
Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants
to write is: leave home.” ― Paul Theroux
“It’s a great lesson about not being too
precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of
your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and
then you have to let it go. You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the
waterslide, overthinking it…You have to let people see what you wrote.” ― Tina
Fey
“Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor
over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a
reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.”
― Joyce Carol Oates
“First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are
transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is
show you’ve been to college.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
“To all the talented young men who wander
about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say:
‘Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the
world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give
yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs
will occupy almost all your energies.’ I do not recommend this course of action
to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch
diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the
ex-intellectual will find that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain
from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him
futile.” ― Bertrand Russell
“Writing a book is a bit like surfing . . .
Most of the time you’re waiting. And it’s quite pleasant, sitting in the water
waiting. But you are expecting that the result of a storm over the horizon, in
another time zone, usually, days old, will radiate out in the form of waves.
And eventually, when they show up, you turn around and ride that energy to the
shore. It’s a lovely thing, feeling that momentum. If you’re lucky, it’s also
about grace. As a writer, you roll up to the desk every day, and then you sit
there, waiting, in the hope that something will come over the horizon. And then
you turn around and ride it, in the form of a story.” ― Tim Winton
“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
Clancy's comment: There are some very good tips here ... And some humour. Always love Neil Gaiman's comments. Hope they helped.
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