About Creative Writing…
“Write With A Fire In Your Heart…”
“First and foremost write the book you want to write, not the one you – or others – think will sell. You’re going to be working on this project for a LONG time, believe me, so you’d better love it. Write with a fire in your heart and you’ll create something special, something readers will want to read.
There may be all sorts of received wisdom out there about ‘what agents are looking for’ or ‘what publishers want’ or ‘what’s selling’ but who wants a second-rate copy of someone else’s idea? Write something unique to you and it will stand out from the crowd.”
HarperCollins Editor for George R.R. Martin & J.R.R. Tolkien
There are few callings higher than that of a writer. We inspire through story. We remind others of truths that have defined humanity since the beginning. We provide a necessary break from the monotony of the everyday. We create worlds. The words we string together serve an invaluable function: They become a mirror the reader holds to himself. They show us not how we are so different from one another, but how we are so much the same.
Perhaps it is because that calling is so high that it is also so fraught with peril. Writing is not for the weak or timid. It requires courage to face the page every day. To send out queries that may not even be answered, to pour yourself into a story that may or may not be read, and to lay yourself bare to a world that may only reject you.
– Bill Coffey.
“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”– Tom Stoppard
“Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.”
– Natalie Goldberg
“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”
– Stanislaw Lem.
“True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”
– Yevgeny Zamyatin; A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin.