You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
– Ray Bradbury
(Source: thechocolatebrigade, via chiefing)
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
– Ray Bradbury
(Source: thechocolatebrigade, via chiefing)
And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great—that is for “great men”; and it’s “silly.” Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty—so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.
Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women—female-sexed tests. That kind scares them.
I write woman: woman must write woman.
– Hélène Cixous - “The Laugh of the Medusa”
(Source: starsfadein, via grrrlpower)
When I was in my teens and early twenties, with dreams of being a writer, Harlan Ellison’s essays on writing taught me more than anything else did. Truth.
Many of those essays, along with the core short stories that made Harlan famous (or infamous) are in HARLAN 101: Discovering Ellison.
I wrote the introduction. The 406 page book’s a bit pricy but it’s a really good place to go if you intend to write.
HARLAN 101: ENCOUNTERING ELLISON
Designed as both an introduction to Harlan Ellison’s vast body of work and as a manual for would-be writers, Harlan 101 collects the best of the author’s short fiction, seven essays on the craft of writing, and a collection of rarely seen oddities from Ellison’s extensive archives.
The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
– Terence McKenna
(Source: commondense, via lucifelle)
Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck
- Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
- Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
- Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
- If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
- Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
- If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
(Source: nevver, via ellephanta)
When I wrote prose, the same thing always tripped me up: trying to succeed in writing beyond realistic expectations. The desire to be above the level that I was could stop me from progressing on a draft entirely. I would be halted mid-sentence, with little else to do but stew on why I’d stopped. In the slowed-down process of revising work with editors, depressive moods prevailed. I couldn’t bring myself to email them on some days and would get up each morning frightened that the deadline – with the hard finality of the word pressing down on me – was one day closer, or worse, one day behind me, unmet. I would finish multiple drafts, but the piece could never be good enough, never up to the exacting standards that I, like many young writers, had invented for myself. I would stare blankly at the computer, the Word doc refusing to edit itself. Individual sentences would make sense, but the whole would be irreversibly tangled.
It does help, to be a writer, to have the sort of crazed ego that doesn’t allow for failure. The best reaction to a rejection slip is a sort of wild-eyed madness, an evil grin, and sitting yourself in front of the keyboard muttering “Okay, you bastards. Try rejecting this!” and then writing something so unbelievably brilliant that all other writers will disembowel themselves with their pens upon reading it, because there’s nothing left to write.
– Neil Gaiman, On Writing
(Source: journal.neilgaiman.com, via neilgaiman)
i wish i were at the mountains. at the feet, looking up. at the top, looking down. in the middle, cuddling the trees. breathing the curves, moving the air, feeling the difference. the difference is the peacefulness. the difference is my nature. the difference is everything.
102 Resources for Fiction Writers
Here are 102 resources on Character, Point of View, Dialogue, Plot, Conflict, Structure, Outlining, Setting, and World Building, plus some links to generate Ideas and Inspiration.
CHARACTER, POINT OF VIEW, DIALOGUE
The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test
Priming the idea pump (A character checklist shamlessly lifted from acting)
Handling a Cast of Thousands – Part I: Getting to Know Your Characters
Establishing the Right Point of View: How to Avoid “Stepping Out of Character”
How to Start Writing in the Third Person
Web Resources for Developing Characters
What are the Sixteen Master Archetypes?
Fiction Writer’s Character Chart
Fiction Writer’s Character Chart
Villains are People, Too, But …
Top 10 Tips for Writing Dialogue
Advantages, Disadvantages and Skills (character traits)
How to Write a Character Bible
Character Development Exercises
All Your Characters Sounds the Same — And They’re Not a Hivemind!
Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Difference for Successful Fiction
Family Echo (family tree website)
Interviewing Characters: Follow the Energy
100 Character Development Questions for Writers
Lineage Chart Layout Generator
PLOT, CONFLICT, STRUCTURE, OUTLINE
How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method
Effectively Outlining Your Plot
Conflict and Character within Story Structure
Ideas, Plots & Using the Premise Sheets
Creating Conflict and Sustaining Suspense
Plunge Right In … Into Your Story, That Is!
Fiction Writing Tips: Story Grid
Tips for Creating a Compelling Plot
The Thirty-six (plus one) Dramatic Situations
The Evil Overlord Devises a Plot: Excerpt from Stupid Plotting Tricks
The Hero’s Journey: Summary of the Steps
Outline Your Novel in Thirty Minutes
SETTING, WORLD BUILDING
The Art of Description: Eight Tips to Help You Bring Your Settings to Life
Creating the Perfect Setting – Part I
An Impatient Writer’s Approach to Worldbuilding
Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions
Character and Setting Interactions
Creating Fantasy and Science Fiction Worlds
Maps Workshop — Developing the Fictional World Through Mapping
IDEAS, INSPIRATION
Solve Your Problems Simply by Saying Them Out Loud
Writing Inspiration, or Sex on a Bicycle
Creative Acceleration: 11 Tips to Engineer a Productive Flow
The Seven Major Beginner Mistakes
Complete Your First Book with these 9 Simple Writing Habits
Free Association, Active Imagination, Twilight Imaging
Story Starters and Idea Generators
REVISION
One-Pass Manuscript Revision: From First Draft to Last in One Cycle
Revising Your Novel: Read What You’ve Written
Writing 101: So You Want to Write a Novel Part 3: Revising a Novel
TOOLS and SOFTWARE
My Writing Nook (online text editor; free)
Bubbl.us (online mind map application; free)
Freemind (mind map application; free; Windows, Mac, Linux, portable)
XMind (mind map application; free; Windows, Mac, Linux, portable)
Liquid Story Binder (novel organization and writing software; free trial, $45.95; Windows, portable)
Scrivener (novel organization and writing software; free trial, $39.95; Mac)
SuperNotecard (novel organization and writing software; free trial, $29; Windows, Mac, Linux, portable)
yWriter (novel organization and writing software; free; Windows, Linux, portable)
JDarkRoom (minimalist text editor; free; Windows, Mac, Linux, portable)
AutoRealm (map creation software; free; Windows, Linux with Wine)
(Source: ruthlesscalculus, via goldenfools)
Rules For Writing
From Jonathan Franzen:
- The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
- Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
- Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
- Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
- When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
- The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
- You see more sitting still than chasing after.
- It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
- Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
- You have to love before you can be relentless.
