Category Archives: Reference

Quotations on Writing (2021)

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I usually try to post some writing quotation during NaNoWriMo (since I have a website where I collect quotations to draw from) So here are some I’ve gathered over the past year. Notes and further sourcing of the quotations can be found at the links.

I feel more alive when I’m writing than I do at any other time — except when I’m making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment — the moment of the writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.

May Sarton (1912-1995) Belgian-American poet, novelist, memoirist
Interview (1983)

     “Why did you kill Maurice Lennox?” she asked reproachfully.
“He was the villain,” protested Anne. “He had to be punished.”
“I like him best of them all,” said unreasonable Diana.
“Well, he’s dead, and he’ll have to stay dead,” said Anne, rather resentfully. “If I had let him live he’d have gone on persecuting Averil and Perceval.”
“Yes — unless you had reformed him.”
“That wouldn’t have been romantic, and, besides, it would have made the story too long.”

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) Canadian author
Anne of the Island, ch. 12 (1915)

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) British fabulist
“Politics, Portugal and No Gumbo-Limbo Trees,” blog entry (17 Nov 2004)

Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do.

James Richardson (b. 1950) American poet
“Vectors: 56 Aphorisms and Ten-second Essays,”
Michigan Quarterly Review, # 25 (Spring 1999)

But the problem is that bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) German-American author, poet
“Charles Bukowski,” interview by Alden Mills, Arete (Jul/Aug 1989)

If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.

Hugh Prather (1938-2010) American minister, writer, counselor
Notes to Myself (1970)

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics — Well, they can do whatever they wish.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) Russian-American author, polymath
Nemesis, “Author’s Note” (1989)

More books have resulted from somebody’s need to write than from anybody’s need to read.

Ashleigh Brilliant (b. 1933) Anglo-American writer, epigramist, cartoonist
Pot-Shots, #3273

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it’s impossible, it’s like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it’s done.

Lewis Black (b. 1948) American comedian
Interview by Amelie Gillette, The Onion A.V. Club (7 Jun 2006)

People think that you have these things called ideas and that writing is a matter of imposing them on the subject material, whereas it’s only in the writing that I discover what it is that I think.

Anthony Lane (b. 1962) British journalist, film critic
“A Writer’s Life,” interview by Will Cohu, The Telegraph (14 Dec 2003)

Because as writers we’ll do anything — organize the closet, clean the garage — to avoid writing.

Lynn Vincent (b. 1962) American author, journalist
In The New Yorker, “Lives of the Saints” (15 Oct 2012)

JERRY: Writing is also one of those things like … I’d rather fill in all the “o”s in the phone book. [Laughs]. You know what I mean? Anything is more fun than trying to write songs.

BOB: I’d rather be in the dentist’s chair. The blank page is the most frightening, most horrifying, the most toothy, snarling, god-awful thing I can imagine.

JERRY: Any excuse to not do it is good enough.

BOB: Man, look at those dishes mounting up. How can I work in this pigsty?

Jerry Garcia (1942-1995) American singer-songwriter and guitarist
Interview of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir by Jon Sievert,
Guitar Player Magazine (20 May 1993)

Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer about the progress of his disease.

Jay McInerney (b. 1955) American novelist, screenwriter, editor
Brightness Falls, ch. 1 (1985)

Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are the best of all.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965) British statesman and author
The Times Literary Award luncheon, London (2 Nov 1949)

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) French playwright, actor, director
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society [Le Suicidé de la Société] (1947)

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. […] Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

Stephen King (b. 1947) American author
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2001)

The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest. Life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.

Stephen King (b. 1947) American author
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2001)

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) American writer
(Attributed)

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) English writer
“A Room of One’s Own,” ch. 6 (1929)

Regional American dialects and word choice

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Something anyone writing contemporary fiction set in America should make use of: regional word choices, as mined from Twitter location data.

#DoingWrite

Originally shared by +Karen Conlin

If you're a fiction writer, and your work is set in, let's say, South Dakota, and you're wondering about which word to use for the meal eaten in the evening-ish hours (say, around 6 p.m.), you can look at this map and see that "dinner" is more common to the east and west of the US, and "supper" in the upper Midwest and Great Plains.

And you can enter other words to search as you desire. AND there are other categories.

It's COOL.



The great American word mapper
Make your own maps and find out where Americans use 100,000 different words

Original Google+ post

Getting shot

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George Orwell on his experience (in the Spanish Civil War) of getting shot:

 Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the center of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock – no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.

Literary Wills

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Neil Gaiman posts about literary estate planning — authors making sure not just that the candlesticks and “second-best bed” are accounted for in wills, but the writing corpus of an author. Worth reading.

John M. Ford was pretty much the smartest writer I knew. Mostly. He did one thing that was less than smart, though: he knew he wasn’t in the best of health, but he still didn’t leave a proper will, and so didn’t, in death, dispose of his literary estate in the way that he intended to while he was alive, which has caused grief and concern to the people who were closest to him.

He’s not the first writer I know who didn’t think to take care of his or her posthumous intellectual property. For example, I knew a writer — a great writer — separated from and estranged from his wife during the last five years of his life. He died without making a will, and his partner, who understood and respected his writing, was shut out, while his wife got the intellectual property, and has not, I think, treated it as it should have been treated. These things happen, and they happen too often.

Estate planning is important. Dammit, I know it’s important, and even I’m not nearly where I should be with it.

Space – the Final Frontier

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Bits and pieces of trivia regarding life in space (in the early 21st Century, at least).

Jones said his usual routine would be to stick the floss, the slivers of fingernails and other detritus onto a snippet of sticky tape – then crumple up the tape, put it in a waste bag and seal the bag.

“You can’t fly without duct tape or Velcro,” said Mario Runco, a veteran of three shuttle flights.

Among the other tips:

  • Drinks are generally contained in the kinds of foil pouches familiar to most third-graders on Earth – and the drink straws have to be clamped closed with clips when they’re not being sipped from. Otherwise globules of sticky grape juice or orange juice can blurp out of the straw and float around. Jones admitted that he was guilty of this breach during one of his spaceflights, and was embarrassed to find that “our grape spots were still on the walls” of the shuttle interior months later.
  • When you brush your teeth, you have to close your lips carefully around the brush, then spit the foam into a towel.
  • The shuttle’s zero-gravity toilet works by sucking down urine, or using ducted air to blow away solid waste. But because the air currents have to flow in just the right way, you have to make sure to “sit precisely on that seat” to get the proper seal, Jones said. In fact, NASA has a “rendezvous and docking trainer” on Earth so that astronauts can practice their toilet technique before their spaceflight, he said. “After some practice, you begin to get the feel for it, if you know what I mean,”
    Jones said.
  • Daily exercise is part of the routine – especially for a long-duration space station flight, because astronauts have to guard against losing bone or muscle mass in zero-G. But because there’s no natural convection in freefall, air warmed by the heat of a workout tends to float like a cloud around exercising astronauts. And that leads to increased perspiration. You have to aim an air duct toward yourself to blow away the hot air, or wipe yourself down repeatedly with a towel. Whatever you do,
    don’t let the sweat build up too much. “One false snap of the head, and you’ll send a quart of salty water off in someone’s direction,” Jones said.
  • Although the Skylab space station had an actual shower, today’s shuttle and station crews bathe by rubbing themselves down with wet, hot towels, then applying some rinseless soap. Hair is washed by applying water to the head (surface tension keeps the water from floating away), then using rinseless hospital-style shampoo. Then you towel yourself off, perhaps putting your head under an air duct to help dry your hair. “If you use that on a daily basis, you’ll never offend anyone,” Jones said.