Read and then Write

“Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” – Meg Rosoff

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury Zen in the Art of Writing

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemmingway

“And the idea of just wandering off to a café with a notebook and writing and seeing where it takes me for a while is just bliss.” – J.K. Rowling

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” – Mark Twain

“In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and the joy comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behaviour.” – Ray Bardbury

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” – Robert Frost

“I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.” – Steven Wright

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” – Isaac Asimov

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anais Nin

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.” – Lloyd Alexander

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Writing is an extreme privilege but it is also a gift. It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving a story to someone.” – Amy Tan

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” – Frank Herbert

“Writing is a journey of discovery because until you start, your never know what will happen, and you can be surprised by what you do – expect the unexpected!” – Mini Grey

Do you have any writing quotes to share?

By Shari Marshall – 2018