Writing Advice

"First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't." - Octavia E. Butler

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done. It’s that easy, and that hard." - Neil Gaiman

"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story." - Terry Pratchett

"The only way out is through." - Robert Frost

"I like David Foster Wallace’s notion that writer’s block is always a function of the writer having set a too-high bar for herself. You know: you type a line, it fails to meet the “masterpiece standard,” you delete it in shame, type another line, delete it—soon the hours have flown by and you are a failure sitting in front of a blank screen. The antidote, for me, has been getting comfortable with my own revision process—seeing those bad first lines as just a starting place. If you know the path you’ll take from bad to better to good, you don’t get so dismayed by the initial mess. So: writing is of you, but it’s not YOU. There’s this eternal struggle between two viewpoints: 1) good writing is divine and comes in one felt swoop, vs: 2) good writing evolves, through revision, and is not a process of sudden, inspired, irrevocable statement but of incremental/iterative exploration. I prefer and endorse the second viewpoint and actually find it really exciting, this notion that we find out what we think by trying (ineptly at first) to write it. And this happens via the repetitive application of our taste in thousands of accretive micro-decisions." - George Sanders

"You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." -  Jack London

"Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." - Louis L’Amour

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down." - Kurt Vonnegut

"As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come." - Ernest Hemingway

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have time—or the tools—to write. Simple as that." - Stephen King

"The first draft of everything is shit." - Ernest Hemingway

"Fantasize about the process. Fantasizing about the end result won't get you anywhere. Fantasizing about the process will get your ass in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard." - Someone on the Internet

"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper." - E B White