Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops on how-to-write books. ~JUDITH BARRINGTON

What lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what’s it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse. ~ISAAC ASIMOV

I write better when just a bit tired. I guess sleepy brain means less brain competition. Less inner critic voices. I like a quiet world for writing. Late at night or early in the morning seem to be best for writing. How about you?

As an author, never wish to be someone else in your writing, wish to be more of yourself. – Wrtr

Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn’t indicate the length of pauses but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin. ~ANNIE DILLARD

For me, editing is a chance to make things right in my novel. And an extra chance to write something new, something cooler than before.

Writing at night brings me a bit of wonder. Many of us writing at the same time together. Each weaving a different kind of story or thought. Pretty cool if you think about it.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn’t. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and #reading and practice – by work.
DONNA TARTT

SOME OF ROBERT MUGABE’S (FORMER PRESIDENT OF ZIMBABWE 🇿🇼) QUOTES ON RACISM

1●. “The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans… The white man is here as a second citizen.”
2● “White farmers’ killers should not be prosecuted.”
3● “Racism will never end as long as white cars are still using black tires.”
4● “Racism will never end if people still use black to symbolise bad luck and WHITE for peace.”
5● “Racism will never end if people still wear white clothes to weddings and black clothes to the funerals.”
6● “Racism will never end as long as we still wash first white clothes, then other colours later.”
7● “Racism will never end as long as those who don’t pay their bills are blacklisted not whitelisted.”
8● “I don’t care, so long as my toilet seat is white and I’m still using the white toilet paper. I’m still fine.”

I’ve tried to figure out what good writing is. I know it when I read it in other people’s work or my own. The closest I’ve come is that there’s a rhythm to the writing, in the sentence and the paragraph. When the rhythm’s off, it’s hard to read the thing. It’s a lot like music in that sense; there’s an internal rhythm that does the work of reading for you. It almost reads itself. That’s one of the things that’s hard to teach to people. If you don’t hear music, you’re never going to hear it. That internal rhythm in a sentence or a paragraph, that’s the DNA of writing. That’s what good writing is. ~SEBASTAIN JUNGER