Creative Writing Students All Write The Same Stories

It's often said of aspiring young writers in creative writing courses that they write the same six stories. Old man dies; old woman dies; why I hate my mother; why I hate my father; how I lost my virginity; how I tried to and failed. That's it.

George V. Higgins 

Fiction Drawn From Reality

Almost anything drawn from "real life"--house, town, park, landscape--will certainly be found to require some distortion for the purpose of plot. Wholly invented scenes are as unsatisfactory (thin) as wholly invented physiques or characters.

Elizabeth Bowen 

Drinking And Writing

In 1978, I got sober. I discovered I associated writing and drinking a little bit like scotch and soda: They went together. I needed to find a method of writing that was more grounded.

Julia Cameron 

The Setting For a Novel

Many novelists make use of their hometown or the various places in which they have lived. And why not? These are places one knows best.

Robert DiMaria 

Great Writers Produce a Body of Work

Young writers write two or three books that are not only brilliant, and mature, and then they are done for. But that is not what enriches the literature of a country. For that you must have writers who can produce not just two or three books, but a great body of work. Of course it will be uneven, because so many fortunate circumstances must go together to produce a masterpiece, but a masterpiece is more likely to come as the culminating point of a laborious career then as the lucky fluke of untaught genius.

W. Sommerset Maugham 

A Writer Who Got an Early Start

I didn't begin to write out of political awareness. I'd been writing since I was nine years old. I published my first adult story when I was fifteen.

Nadine Gordimer

Writers Hear Voices in Their Heads

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.

Meg Chittenden