by Peter van den Heuvel Crash, bang! Levi’s robotic arm smashed through the mech sewer vine, which had been covering the old sewer for aeons. He was being hunted by “The Something”, as everyone called it here in Quinrove. It …
Morning Pages
The bedrock tool of a creative recovery is a daily practice called Morning Pages. Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages …
Enough heart
The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they …
Exercise the writing muscle
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up. Jane Yolen
Writers are here to challenge
Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable—we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job. Jeanette Winterson
The Greatest of Human Inventions
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands …
Philip Pullman on Stories
Stories have to begin. Out of the welter of events and ideas and pictures and characters and voices that you experience in your head, you the storyteller must choose the start. You could begin anywhere in the chronology, of course; …
Roald Dahl’s Seven Tips for Writers
You should have a lively imagination. You should be able to write well. By that I mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader’s mind. Not everybody has this ability. It is a gift …
Persistence
“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” ― Octavia E. …
Truth and Freedom
“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. …