Weekly Creative Writing Tip: Talk About Writing

April 26th, 2008 · No Comments

Typewriter Here’s something you can do when your suffering from a bad case of writer’s block, talk about writing. Start your own collection of writing quotes. If you can’t make them up on your own, just jot down some of your favorites of course the better idea is to come up with your own writing quotes. It doesn’t have to be something amazingly profound either. It can be something simple like this:

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I’m writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.
–Eric Brown

Who knows maybe when you finally hit the big top, you’ll provide a wealth of info for future struggling authors.

Every time you come up with a genuine writing metaphor or stumble upon a quote you love, write it on a little slip of paper and put it in a box on your desk. When you feel stifled, grab one out and remember to think about writing and live the writer’s life. Every great author is passionate about their writing, so it makes sense that you would be talking about it, they did…

By far the greatest thing is to be a master of metaphor.
It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others.
It is a sign of genius, for a good metaphor implies an
intuitive perception of similarity among dissimilars.
–Aristotle

Journalism is often factual but not always honest; poetry isn’t always factual but must be honest.
–LoVerne Brown, journalist and poet

Did it happen? No. Is it true? Yes.
–Ron Carlson on fiction.

Flaubert said, ‘Prose is architecture,’ and this isn’t the baroque era.
–Raymond Carver

I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
–Philip Levine (Hirsch 9)

Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.
–Philip Levine (Hirsch 11)

Verbal passivity is a close relative of passivity of action … ‘I will change my life’ means something different from ‘my life is going to change.’
–Kirk Nesset

The poet’s job is to find what seems important, prominent, but not yet
poetic.
–Robert Pinsky

Fundamental accuracy is the sole morality of writing.
–Ezra Pound

Menial work at the expense of all true, ardent, creative work is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
–Brenda Ueland from If You Want To Write (99)

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.
–Truman Capote

What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can’t reread a phone call.
–Liz Carpenter

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
–Laurence Sterne

Shake[speare] was a dramatist of note; He lived by writing things to quote.
–H C Bunner

As you get older, it’s nice to be able to relax a bit about your appearance. Writing does that for me. It comes from inside me, from my brain and from my heart, and hopefully it has much more value than anything that’s on the exterior.
–Emma Samms

I don’t give a toss about writing really. It’s a bit ironic that the things I’m really into are music and football, and I have never really been good at either.
–Irvine Welsh

No machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding. [not at the time of writing anyhow Louis, who knows what the future will bring!]
–Louis Gerstner

Writing something in the spirit of Halloween is like Mother Teresa writing on charity and sacrifice!
–Danny Elfman

Generally the people out on the pitch are the ones who know how to play the game, not the people who are writing about it.
–Marcus Trescothick

All I want is a modest place in Mr X’s Good Reading, Miss Y’s Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose.
–James Agate

All the rest is mere fine writing. (Art poetique)
–Paul Verlaine

Writing’s much the same at any age - sticking one’s head out of the trench to be shot at, the better to catch some butterfly.
–Fay Weldon

I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.
–Hilaire Belloc

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.
–Thomas A Kempis

‘Rock is all about writing your own script; it’s all about pioneering.’
–Courtney Love

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
–Jack Kerouac

Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one’s first productions.
–Andre Maurois

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer’s love until death.
–Edna Ferber

Songwriting is one of those strange arts whereby you can have no inspiration for a long time then have a productive period where almost every day a new song is coming to you.
–Nanci Griffith

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing
–Bernard Malamud

Despite the fact that I had a writing background, they didn’t want to accept whatever ideas I had as a writer.
–John Amos

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
–Benjamin Franklin

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
–Norman Mailer

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself
–Truman Capote

The key to writing real characters is not to treat everybody like a real person and give everybody a good side and a bad.
–Jon Favreau

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.
–Boris Pasternak

Very often when we stay in a hotel we will rent a single room with a piano in it, buy loads of drinks and do this stuff. writing songs is my favourite pastime ever.
–Vince Clarke

Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory
for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
–Alan Bennett

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

I always did my best in writing to Santa Claus, but I never thought of writing as something you did for a profession.
–Dee Brown

Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
–Adlai E Stevenson

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
–Don DeLillo

I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.
–Patrick Dennis

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
–Frances Hodgson Burnett

Liam is a songwriting genius. His songs make me cry ’cause they are better than mine.
–Noel Gallagher

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.
–Susanna Clarke

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
–Joan Baez

I would sweat and think and get it all together. [On lyric writing]
–Jim Capaldi

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
–Francis Bacon

When I am writing, I focus one hundred percent on my writing. Then, by the time I’m half way through the book, I’m already thinking about the ending.
–Anita Desai

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can’t stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
–T S Eliot

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
–Samuel Crothers

Beauty can’t amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.
–Christian Nestell Bovee

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.
–Kim Gordon

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
–Gustav Flaubert

Still want some more…

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (American Poet, Lecturer and Essayist, 1803-1882)

I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
–Doris Lessing quotes (Persian born British Novelist and short-story Writer b.1919)

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (American Poet, Lecturer and Essayist, 1803-1882)

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
–Nadine Gordimer quotes (South African novelist and short-story writer, 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, b.1923)

There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
–Henry Miller quotes (American Author and Writer, 1891-1980)

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam.
–Alfred Whitney Griswold quotes (American Educator, 1906-1963)

Now you’re getting it…

Well, there you go. Now you’re off to a good start on your collection, better yet, read some of the works by these authors and you’re sure to be inspired.

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