Insights on Writing

I started this page because I always hated passing on copies of writing books or magazines without extracting a couple lines that really resonated with me. Now I have a place to keep those insights and I can pass their sources on to another writer.

From Writers Digest, September 2011, interview with Donald Miller:

WD: You say most writers don’t live good stories because they’re too busy writing, and most people living good stories don’t have time to write …

DM: We have to realize that the part of the writing life where we’re sitting down at the computer is harvesting the crops, but you have to have planted them and watered them and created fertile soil–and that’s life.

From the same issue, an interview with ZZ Packer:

“So in a way, a novel is more like a marriage, and a short story like a youthful affair; it may be over quickly, but you are bound to remember it, and you are bound to have learned something about yourself you didn’t know going in.”

From an unknown issue of FundsForWriters:

“If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.” –Derek Walcott

More quotes from Writers Digest’s fantastic Ken Follett and David Morell interview (and I read neither author!):

“When I write a book, I write a letter to myself. I say, ‘It’s going to take you this amount of time, probably, to write the book–why is this project worth a year of your life?” – DM

“I look at how many chapters I’ve got, how many scenes, how long I want the book to be, and so how many pages will I write per week, and then I make a timetable that says I should have finished this draft on the 13th of December.” – KF

“Whatever happens in the last few chapters must be something either feared or longed for by the characters in the early chapters.” – KF

“The truth is, I’m not so crazy about the world I live in. My son died from cancer, my granddaughter died from cancer, I have a lot of reasons to think that reality is not a friendly neighborhood. The stories that I tell distract me, and if I do the job right they distract people from things that are happening to them that they wish had never happened.” – DM

Unfortunately, didn’t hold onto the full attribution for this fascinating Jerry Spinelli quote:

“I guess the most common obstacle is the essential problem of our craft: transcribing the magic in our heads onto a blank page. Or more precisely: transferring the story in our heads moment by moment, detail by detail, into our readers’ heads. Since we can’t hook them up to a needle and do a story transfusion, we’re left to do it with words. We labor at this thing called writing to make our readers see and feel everything we see and feel. When I read my words aloud to myself, I’m trying to sense how close I’ve come to that ideal.” – Jerry Spinelli