ETH AINA'S CREATIVE ISLAND.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe. Imagine, if you like, Frankenstein’s monster on its slab. Here comes lightning, not from the sky but from a humble paragraph of English words. Maybe it’s the first really good paragraph you wrote, something so fragile and yet full of possibility that you are frightened. You feel as Victor Frankenstein must have when the dead conglomeration of sewn-together spare parts suddenly opened its watery yellow eyes. Oh my God, it’s breathing, you realize. Maybe it’s even thinking. What in hell’s name do I do next?

STEPHEN KING

You mustn’t assume that aesthetic expression is the prime motive for writing; it is really only a means to the more profound end. So don’t worry about it if you write out of sadness or hate or love—fear—or fascination, the important thing, if you wish to do it, is to write.

RALPH ELLISON

I simply produced the kind of hero I’d like to read about: courageous but not foolhardy, compassionate but not sentimental.
P.D. JAMES

#amwriting #fiction

A good editor may spot when something is missing; a bad editor tries to tell you what to put there.
MARY LEE SETTLE#amwriting #editing #fiction #writing

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.
NEIL GAIMAN

#amwriting #writing #writetip

Think like a craftsperson, learn your materials, your tools, and then read a lot of poetry so you don’t keep inventing wheels.
GARY SNYDER

#amwriting #writing #writingtip

Writing is one of those extraordinary things that has its own ebbs and flows. One minute the words are spilling out and the next it’s hard to remember a word. 🙂 That feeling is what makes you an author. #amwriting –

Our primary function is to create an emotion and our second job is to sustain that emotion.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK#screenwriting #directing #writing

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.
RITA DOVE

#amwriting #poetry #writing