Food for thought
| About BEING A WRITER:
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Many people who want to be writers don’t really want to be writers. They want to have been writers.About WRITING:
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Ernest Hemingway
Style comes only after long hard practice – and writing.
Willian Styron
| About WRITING & REWRITING:
Creation really begins for me when I have a first version of the novel, when I have to choose, to select, to eliminate everything that is not worthwhile, for the development of the story. |
I used to throw things out saying, ‘This isn’t great’. It didn’t occur to me that it didn’t have to be great.
About the WRITING PROCESS:
Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah… GOLD!
JOEL SALTZMAN
UCLA professor in Creative Writing
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About WRITING & READING: Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. |
Reading good writing is the best way to learn good writing.
About PURPOSE, FORM and APPROPRIATENESS:
All effective writing, whatever the style, has three characteristics: purpose, form and appropriateness. What makes writing effective when the purpose is to entertain might be inappropriate when the intention is to persuade. 
What makes for good writing in a comic novel would probably be ridiculous in a business memo.
Mitchell Ivers
Managing editor of Random House, Villard Books, Times Books and Turtle Bay Books
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Writing with PURPOSE: |
Writing with FORM:
I always know the ending, that’s where I start.
Toni Morrison, American writer, Nobel Prize in Literature
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Writing with STYLE: |
The writer works with genuine feelings, but also with lots of technique – in order to convey sensations in a book, it is necessary to have self-control and coldness in the narrative architecture. It is a typical literature’s contradiction and what makes it different from mere confession or catharsis.