This rather excellent website is a treasure trove of wisdom, experience and soundbites that will have you staying the course and laughing as you go!
Check out some of its pearls of wisdom below or better still visit its website for the full lowdown.
Some nuggets of wisdom!
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
– Stephen King
It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.
– Ernest Hemingway
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
– Somerset Maugham
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
– Herman Melville
It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.
– C. J. Cherryh
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
– Robert Benchley
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
– Henry David Thoreau
I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
– Edgar Rice Burroughs
Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.
– Ayn Rand
Half my life is an act of revision.
– John Irving
And some additionals.....
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
– William Faulkner
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
A wounded deer leaps the highest.
– Emily Dickinson
You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money’s in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.
– Larry Niven
Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
– Jane Yolen
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
– Edgar Rice Burroughs