thoughts on writing
“Writing is often the process by which you realize you do not understand what you are talking about.”
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We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.
Stephen King • On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (A Memoir of the Craft (Reissue))
Without a first draft, there would be no novel, so this is without a doubt the most important accomplishment of the writer.
Walter Mosley • This Year You Write Your Novel
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
—Terry Pratchett
One-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start, you might shoot for one short story a week, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done.
Ray Bradbury • Zen in the Art of Writing
I like the idea that, at the end of the day, it’s the reader who generates the book’s meaning as much as the writer, and it’s the writer’s job to start that transaction but not necessarily to finish it.
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“You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”