Cups...
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
--Ray Bradbury
Inspiring and encouraging quotes for writers.
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
Whether you’re a writer who also works a full-time job or are a busy stay-at-home-mom, it’s hard to stay healthy. I researched and figured out a bunch of tips and tricks to help me stay in shape without carving out of my precious writing time. I also found some tips to help me have just general better health. Pick and choose which of these will work for you.
Labels: Health
"If you're a singer, you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes." --Mickey Spillane
This quote was sent to me by my writing-friend, Glenda Schoonmaker
“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate.” –John Steinbeck
"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
Whether you’re a writer who also works a full-time job or are a busy stay-at-home-mom, it’s hard to stay healthy. I researched and figured out a bunch of tips and tricks to help me stay in shape without carving out of my precious writing time. I also found some tips to help me have just general better health. Pick and choose which of these will work for you.
Labels: Health
“Don't say it was ‘delightful’; make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers 'Please, will you do the job for me?’ ”
When I ask a group of professional writers to state the essential difference between nonfiction and fiction, most are unable to do so . . . Let us state the difference in the simplest way.
“When I begin to lose heart, it does me good to recall a lesson in the dignity of art which I learned years ago at a theater in Assisi, in Italy. Helena and I had gone to see an evening of pantomime and no one else showed up. The two of us made up the entire audience. When the lights dimmed, we were joined by the usher and the ticket seller. Yet despite the fact that there were more people on stage than in the audience, the actors worked as hard as if the were basking in the glory of al full house on opening night. They put their hearts and souls into the performance and it was marvelous.”
“We all feed the lake. That is what is important. It is a corporate act. During my time in the theatre I knew what it was to be part of such an enlarging of the human potential, and though I was never more than a bit play or an understudy, I knew the truth of Stanislavsky’s words: “There are no small roles. There are only small players.” And I had the joy of being an instrument in the great orchestra of a play, learning from the play (how much Chekov taught me during the run of The Cherry Orchard), from the older actors and actresses. I was part of the Body. That’s what it’s all about.
Whether you’re a writer who also works a full-time job or are a busy stay-at-home-mom, it’s hard to stay healthy. I researched and figured out a bunch of tips and tricks to help me stay in shape without carving out of my precious writing time. I also found some tips to help me have just general better health. Pick and choose which of these will work for you.
Labels: Health
“It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.” –C.S. Lewis
"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."
“The novelist is like the conductor of an orchestra, his back to the audience, his face invisible, summoning the experience of music for the people he cannot see. The writer as conductor also gets to compose the music and play all of the instruments, a task less formidable that it seems. What it requires is the conscious practice of providing an extraordinary experience for the reader, who should be oblivious to the fact that he is seeing words on paper.” Sol Stein, On Writing, p. 8
Whether you’re a writer who also works a full-time job or are a busy stay-at-home-mom, it’s hard to stay healthy. I researched and figured out a bunch of tips and tricks to help me stay in shape without carving out of my precious writing time. I also found some tips to help me have just general better health. Pick and choose which of these will work for you.
Labels: Health
There's no hard and fast rule on how much to write per day. I know great writers who produce just 3-4 polished pages a day. I write only on deadline and I schedule 20 finished pages a day, but then need to go back and polish later. If I get my 20 pages done by noon, great. If it takes till midnight, so be it. I can't allow myself to fall behind. The best rule of thumb is to keep your seat in the chair and work for as long as you have energy, but never submit anything until you know you can't make it better.
I met a guy once who had some nerve damage in his neck from a diving accident. Then one morning he woke up and felt like he couldn't breathe. They took him to the ER and found that he was actually getting air into his lungs. No problem there. But his nerves were telling his brain, "No oxygen in lungs. Panic!" He's learned to live with that feeling every second of his life.That's a little like writing. On EVERY single book I've ever written, there's come a time when I was convinced the thing was going to be a train wreck, that it simply could not be done, that this would be the book that sent my pathetic little career crashing into the cliffs in a flaming heap of jagged metal. It's not a good feeling, but it beats feeling like you can't breathe. So I've learned to live with that feeling. And it makes it all the sweeter at 3 AM on the night before the book is due, when I hit Send on my email and blast that puppy off to my editor and go collapse in bed in a flaming heap of jagged metal.
Here is a quote I found while researching for my new book on Marriage, it's taken from Sharon Jaynes book, Dreams of a Woman.
Whether you’re a writer who also works a full-time job or are a busy stay-at-home-mom, it’s hard to stay healthy. I researched and figured out a bunch of tips and tricks to help me stay in shape without carving out of my precious writing time. I also found some tips to help me have just general better health. Pick and choose which of these will work for you.
Labels: Health