How To Get The Reader's Attention

Show me a villain and I'll show you conflict. Show me conflict and I'll show you a struggle. Show me a struggle, and I'll show you drama. Show me drama, and I'll show you readers paying attention.

William Noble 

William Faulkner on Inspiration to Write

I don't know anything about inspiration, because I don't know what inspiration is--I've heard about it, but I never saw it.

William Faulkner 

In Writing, You Don't Have To Get It Right The First Time

The beautiful part about writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

Robert Cormier 

E. M. Forster On The Literary Critic

[The literary critic's] constant reference to genius is a characteristic of the pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the word exempts him from trying to discover its meaning. Literature is written by geniuses. Novelists are geniuses....Everything [the critic] says may be accurate but all is useless because he is moving round books instead of through them. He either has not read them or cannot read them properly. Books have to be read...it is the only way of discovering what they contain....The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time, to events in the life of its author, or to the events it describes.

E. M. Forster

The Importance of a Novel's Characters

If you can't create characters that are vivid in the reader's imagination, you can't create a good novel. Characters are to a novelist what lumber is to a carpenter and what bricks are to a bricklayer. Characters are the stuff out of which a novel is constructed.

James N. Frey 

Becoming More Than a One-Book Author

Anyone can become a writer. The trick is not in becoming a writer, it is staying a writer. Day after week after month after year. Staying in there for the long haul.

Harlan Ellison 

Sylvia Plath's Despair

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

Sylvia Plath