On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Stephen King

a book whose company, upon completion, i sorely missed.

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...to write is human, to edit is divine.
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Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recogniz them when they show up.
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…write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right––as right as you can, anyway––it belongs to anyone who wants to read it.
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Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
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...stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emmotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
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Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look the same when we're puking in the gutter.
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Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.
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One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little big ashamed of your short ones.
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Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word––of course you will, there's always another word––but it probably won't be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.
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...the reader must always be your main concern; without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void.
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Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.
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What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy's positions, come back, tell us all you know.
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...if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.
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...you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

Drink and be filled up.
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Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Maya Angelou

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Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives. The struggle for equality continues unabated, and the woman warrior who is armed with wit and courage will be among the first to celebrate victory.

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Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well.

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It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy.

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Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.

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Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.

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Bird by Bird

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Anne Lamott

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But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do––the actual act of writing––turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

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E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

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Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend.

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And it feels so great finally to dive into the water; maybe you splash around and flail for a while, but at least you’re in. Then you start doing whatever stroke you can remember how to do, and you get this scared feeling inside you––of how hard it is and how far there is to go––but still you’re in, and you’re afloat, and you’re moving.

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Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

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To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass––seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.

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But you have to believe in your position, or nothing will be driving your work. If you don’t believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it.

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You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out so much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

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A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide.

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You cannot write out of someone else’s big dark place; you can only write out of your own.

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If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act––truth is always subversive.

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To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive am I willing to be?

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