More Time

"No, you wouldn't write a novel if you just had the time. If you're not writing one anyway, let's face it, you're probably not going to do it."

-E.J. Copperman-

How do you Know you're a Writer?

"A writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing."

-Junot Diaz-

Writing

"Wrestling with words gave me my moments of greatest meaning."
-Richard Wright-

Procrastination

Boy, if I didn't have a book to write, I would never get my closets organized.
-SUSAN ORLEAN-

Suspense

"Suspense is achieved by information control: What you know. What the reader knows. What the characters know."
-TOM CLANCY-

Overprotective

"As authors we like our protagonists. We are tempted to protect them from trouble. That temptation must be resisted."
-DONALD MAASS-

Biased?

Let's face it, your mother and immediate family will love anything you write. -
PENNY C. SANSEVIERI-

First Drafts

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about.
-BERNARD MALAMUD-

Solitary Confinement

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement–if you can't deal with this you needn't apply.
-WILL SELF-

Solitude

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
-DON DE LILLO-

Concentrated Sweat

Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story rather than dissipate it over a dozen.
-JACK LONDON-

Time Shrinks

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time.
Three hours seems like three minutes.
-GORE VIDAL-

Just Do It

Fifteen minutes of work on something is 100 times better than thinking about working on something.
-T. BENTLEY-

Writers Read

"Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books."

JUDITH BARRINGTON

What to Write About

"Don't write what you know. Write what you care about."
Carolyn See

No Vacation

"A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing."
Eugene Ionesco

Poetry

"At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet."
PLATO

Work or Play?

"Just remember, writers are the only adults who get to spend all day in their pajamas playing with imaginary friends."
-Paul Bishop-

What do Writers Do?

"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window."
-Burton Rascoe-

Why Write Memoir?

"Every life has its defining moments."
"Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness."
"I still have a need to create a narrative of my life. To keep writing until I see how it turns out."
Sue Monk Kidd, interview with the author, in The Secret Life of Bees.

"A memoir is an act not just of preservation, but of invention. The memoir is a narrative construct: literary shape that you give to the past. Much is left out, much is subsumed, much is demanded."
"It aspires to be the truth. It claims to be the truth. But it's the truth seen through a particular prism. Time is the prism that all things must pass through. And in so doing, they change. The past is never the same. It always changes according to the present."
"...alteration is inevitable. As a result, truth belongs to the teller."
"The experience described in the memoir is not fresh. Not raw. The grit of daily life has been expunged, polished, washed away. The memoir has always the advantage of hindsight. It recognizes the significance of people and events. It pulls the past into a pattern. It gives the past shape and meaning that it did not have when it was the present."
"In a memoir, the author and the narrator have an uneasy relationship. What does the reader know of the author? That the author lived to tell the tale. What does the reader know of the narrator? That the tale needed to be told."
"The memoir presupposes a first-person narrator, and a structure. It cannot be formless or amorphous. Only you can put the structure on your experience. Your experience becomes your material. Your narrative voice must be compatible with your structure."
"The author's need to write the memoir is implied in the form itself."
Penny Taylor, in Laura Kalpakian's The Memoir Club