Prompts for Writers and Inspiration for Readers
Olen Steinhauer Description Mastery
“Most of them, just before leaving home, watched Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance through white-bread streets and are shocked by today’s rues and avenues. Instead of fat old men with mustaches offering slices of cheese with aperitifs, they’re faced with white boys in dirty dreadlocks playing movie sound tracks on beat-up guitars, suspiciously pushy…
Natalie Goldberg On Practice
“Keep your hand moving. If you say you will write for ten minutes, twenty, an hour, keep your hand going. Not frantically, clutching the pen.” (Natalie Goldberg, The True Secret of Writing)
Stephen King On Theme
“In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King writes: “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest … it seems to me that every book—at least every one worth reading—is about something.”This something is better known…
James Wood On Style
“Free indirect style is at its most powerful when hardly visible or audible: “Jen watched the orchestra through stupid tears.” In my example, the word “stupid” marks the sentence as written in free indirect style. … The addition of the word “stupid” raises the question: Whose word is this? It’s unlikely that I would want…
Lee Child On Writing
“G. K. Chesterton once said of Charles Dickens, “Dickens didn’t write what people wanted. Dickens wanted what people wanted.” I would never compare myself to Charles Dickens, but I know exactly what Chesterton meant.” (Lee Child, Killing Floor)
Maggie Smith On Experiencing
“Be greedy for experience. Take it all in—all of it, again and again, because imagination is inexhaustible—and then tell us about it. Transport us there. Invite us in.” (Maggie Smith, Dear Writer)
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