Writing Skills Quotes

Quotes tagged as "writing-skills" Showing 1-11 of 11
Paul Di Filippo
“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”
Paul Di Filippo, How To Write Science Fiction

Flannery O'Connor
“I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it.

But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.”
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Sudakshina Bhattacharjee
“Think before you write, while you write- and definitely after you have written.”
Sudakshina Bhattacharjee, Improve Your Global Business English: The Essential Toolkit for Writing and Communicating Across Borders

“Experience is the only subject worthwhile of study.”
Lailah Gifty Akita

“Prof. Emi Ito said “Lailah, if you can’t explain the scientific observations in a simple sentence, it means you do not know enough.”
Lailah Gifty Akita

K.M. Weiland
“For example, one key character who was definitely not supposed to die did just that. I did everything I could to get her up again, but she just... died on me.”
K.M. Weiland, Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success

“I played pinochle with my grandmothers. I thought I was the only person under the age of sixty who knew how to play. He also used the Oxford comma. That has to mean something, doesn't it?”
Amy Bellows, A Handkerchief for Kade

Hjalmar Söderberg
“Hay personas que escriben tan extraordinariamente bien que me parece que podrían demostrar cualquier cosa. Siempre me parecía que tenía razón el que escribía mejor y con mayor belleza”
Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

George Saunders
“Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.”
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life