cwq – Page 39 – Creative Writing Quotes

“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”

“Start as close to the end as possible”

“Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

“Every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That’s the secret of artistic unity. … If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

“Make characters want something right away — even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

“When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.”

“It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.”

“Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

“The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.”

“Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.”

“I’m not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.”

“Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can — not more than the people around you but not so much less.”

“Literature is the question minus the answer.”

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing a Short Story

“All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”