Writing Process Quotes

“...kapag binisita ka ng idea, gana o inspirasyon, kailangan mong itigil LAHAT ng ginagawa mo para lang di masayang ang pagkakataon. Walang “sandali lang” o “teka muna”. Dahil pag lumagpas ang maikling panahong yon, kahit mag-umpog ka ng ulo sa pader mahihirapan ka nang maghabol.”
― Bob Ong, Stainless Longganisa

“...the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Writing
is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.
The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and
writing some more can help you control issues that you face.”
― Guy Kawasaki, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a Book

“If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.”
― Baby Halder, A Life Less Ordinary: A Memoir

“Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.”
― Martial, Epigrams

“Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!"' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear.”
― Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale

“People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.”
― Michelle M. Pillow

“...the most beautiful things don't always make you happy - often they make you weep...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.”
― Shandy L. Kurth

“« L'écrit ça arrive comme le vent, c'est nu, c'est de l'encre, c'est l'écrit, et ça passe comme rien d'autre ne passe dans la vie, rien de plus, sauf elle, la vie. »”
― Marguerite Duras, Writing

“...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?"
"Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.”
― Dorothy Sayers

“I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“...it's not the medium that's the message - it's consciousness - the wonder of being able to wonder ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“... my early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Confession: I don't want to be one of my characters. I'm mean to them sometimes. Really mean.”
― Michelle M. Pillow

“...if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“...there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“...I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next

Kim Cormack”
― Kim Cormack

“I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. When
people read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.”
― Guy Kawasaki, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a Book

“I’m feeling a low regarding writing. I sometimes think I should finish working on my book of stripper poetry that I started, but other times I feel like it’s not worth it. Sometimes I think I should work on my comic book idea, and then other times I want to work on a website, and still other times I think I should be working on this memoir. That’s a lot of thinking about writing without a whole lot of writing going on.”
― Sheila Hageman, Stripping Down: A Memoir

“Most—but not all—of the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn’t want to be anyone’s employee if it interfered with their writing. They were halfway or all the way outside the mainstream and were often not interested in becoming part of the burgeoning corporate society. They had more freedom than your average American.”
― Sterling Lord, Lord of Publishing: A Memoir