On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (A Memoir of the Craft (Reissue))

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.

The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.

There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something.

Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.

The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing—literary Viagra. You’ll feel it and your I.R. will, too.

every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is thinking, “I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?”

The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a What-if question:

And if I’m not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety.

I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.