More Quotes About Writing

I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month again. I’ve been writing everyday but not as much as I had hoped. One thing I do for motivation is read quotes about writing. Here are some of the ones that I’ve turned to for inspiration this month. 

“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.” — Isabel Allende

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it’s only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” — Jane Yolen 

“If you write every day, the next day ideas have bubbled up from someplace that you had no idea was there.”  — Walter Mosely

“The process of writing is a really important one because even in the process of writing anything simple, your mind starts to notice connections, and connections are what fiction is made of.” — Neil Gaiman

“You have to write when you’re not inspired, scenes that don’t inspire you. The weird thing is later, you’ll look back and can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired, and which you wrote because they had to be written next.” — Neil Gaiman 

 

"No action simply for the sake of action. It’s got to serve a purpose — better if it serves 2-3 purposes: illuminate character, advance the plot, add a wrinkle, add an obstacle, culminate a character arc, or set the stage.” — Scott Oden 

 

"Try to leave out the part readers tend to skip.” — Elmore Leonard 

"What occurs in your mind is a great swirling mass of half-formed notions, which are interwoven with worries, memories, songs, and emotions; the signal-to-noise ratio is overwhelming. Putting the thought in writing crystalizes it and gives it life.” —  Luc Sante

 

“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” — Ernest Hemingway 

“Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.”  — Katherine Mansfield 

“Beginning is hard but continuing is harder. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.” — Kevin Aston 

“Writing is like breathing, it’s possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.”  — Julia Cameron