Quote: Portrait of Himself
Writing » QuotesApril 14th, 2007
Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
- Samuel Butler
Quote: Novels are Today’s Mythology
Writing » QuotesFebruary 19th, 2007
If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently…
Quote: Embellishment
Writing » QuotesFebruary 7th, 2007
Do not embellish so much in the pursuit of drama that you lose sight of the truth. Beware telling only one side of the story. It’s unfair to your audience, leaving them to think and act on false impressions.
- Jennifer Jackson (arcaedia at LiveJournal)
Quote: The Plot
Writing » Plot, QuotesJanuary 25th, 2007
The primary purpose of the plot is to give the protagonist a reason to change in the direction she needs to change.
- Alicia Rasley
Quote: New Year’s Resolutions
Writing » QuotesDecember 31st, 2006
My New Year’s resolution is to focus on the book and forget all the crap that surrounds the writing business. To lose myself in a story, and not give a damn if it makes any lists, has a good sell-through, gets glowing reviews on Amazon, pleases my editors, hell, even pleases my readers. I want to love what I’m writing so much that none of the rest of it matters, and if I don’t, I won’t write it. Life’s too short to abuse the muse.
- Anne Stuart
Quote: Daydreaming
Book Reviews » QuotesDecember 15th, 2006
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.
- Neil Gaiman
And for the record, I’ve given up on reading Anno Dracula by Kim Newman. Believe me, I absolutely hate to drop a book, especially when the idea is so clever. She uses this Victorian fiction to theorize that Jack the Ripper was actually the boyfriend of the young woman who had to be staked in the original Dracula; that the Ripper didn’t just kill prostitutes, but vamipiric prostitutes. Did I just make vampiric up? Possibly, but I think you get the idea, right?
Re-Writing Breakthrough
Writing » NaNoWriMo, Quotes, Work-in-ProgressDecember 6th, 2006
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.
- Stephen King
And so I conclude my finals week with ever-happy thoughts about my original work-in-progress, The Winslow Charade. It’s funny, seeing that title, considering I just use it because it’s there, and really has nothing to do with the story anymore. In any case, I had a breakthrough the other night while I was studying. I’ve been worried about the pacing of the book. It feels too slow, especially now that I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo. So, at 2 am in the morning, I decided that I was going to shift the beginning of the story forward approximately six months. Now everything is much more condensed, and the story will have to move faster because the characters have less time to make decisions–which means more conflict, which is always, but ALWAYS, good.
Quote: Rewriting
Writing » QuotesDecember 3rd, 2006
The key idea to remember is that fixing a broken novel is liked organizing an overstuffed closet: things get messier before they get better.
Apostrophes and Bibliophiles
Writing » NaNoWriMo, Quotes, Work-in-ProgressDecember 3rd, 2006
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. - Scott Adams
Is it sad that I find literary posters amusing? Click [here] to see Bob the Angry Flower’s take on those dreaded apostrophe rules.
In other news, I printed my NaNoWriMo the other day at the computer lab that I work at (I print everything there because I practically have free printing, my quota is so large), and shock and awe! Somehow, I wrote 177 double-spaced pages in one month. It took me three years to write the prequel. Le sigh.
Quote: Characters
Writing » QuotesNovember 29th, 2006
Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page. - Eudora Welty
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