Wise words, indeed. Tiny little words, but still wise.

Writing is the opposite of reading, only harder. Your average bump on a log can read a book, but a log never has.

Writing 

"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark." Henry David Thoreau 

"Writing is an adventure." Winston Churchill 

"Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them." Allan Gurganus 

 "... only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things." Anton Chekhov 

"A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightening." James Dicke

 "It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."Robert Benchley 

"You ask for the distinction between the terms "Editor" and "Publisher": an editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors." M. Lincoln Schuster 

"A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes." William Sansom 

"I don't like to write, but I love to have written." Michael Kanin

"However great a man's natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned all at once." Jean Jacques Roussea 

"You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country." Robert Frost 

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."Oscar Wilde 

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." Cyril Connolly 

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."Peter de Vries

          "A writer is working when he's staring out of the window."Burton Rascoe

"The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention." Ezra Pound 

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." Elmore Leonard

"Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped." Lillian Helman 

"I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none." Robert Frost

"Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of them…Avoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation."Jacques Barzun

"You must write every single day of your life…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads….may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world." Ray Bradbury

"What a writer brings to any story is an attitude…" John Gregory Dunne

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." E.L. Doctorow

"The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly…Once you've got some words looking back at you, you can take two or three - throw them away and look for others." Bernard Malamud

"Write in recollection and amazement for yourself." Jack Kerouac

"If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." Toni Morrison

"To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later." Brander Matthews

"In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give to your style." Sydney Smith

"…your reader is at least as bright as you are." William Maxwell

"…you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Whether or not you write well, write bravely." Bill Stout

"The writer's duty is to keep on writing…" William Styron
"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." D.H. Lawrence

"Caress the detail, the divine detail." Vladimir Nabokov

"Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better."
"The first draft of anything is sh*t." Ernest Hemingway 

"Use the right word and not its second cousin." Mark Twain

"Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write." Robert Penn Warren

"You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing." Doris Lessing

"A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction." Virginia Woolf
"Stick to the point." W. Somerset Maugham

"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time…The wait is simply too long." Leonard S. Bernstein

"The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter."Marcel Proust

"I seat myself at the typewriter and hope, and lurk." Mignon Eberhart

"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting." Arthur Schopenhauer

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching…talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing." E.L. Doctorow

"When genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." D.H. Lawrence
"Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective." Ernest Hemingway
"I write the first sentence and trust in God for the next."Laurence Sterne

"Writing a poem is discovering." Robert Frost

"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average." Derek Walcott

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." Mark TwainV.S. Pritchett

"Write what should not be forgotten…" Isabel Allende

"Even the most productive writers are expert dawdlers…"Donald M. Murray

"Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial…a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer." James Kisner

"Write without pay until somebody offers to pay." Mark Twain

"You have typewriters, presses. And a huge audience. How about raising hell?" Jenkin Lloyd Jones

"Revise and revise and revise - the best thought will come after the printer has snatched away the copy." Michael Morahan

"In a writer there must always be two people - the writer and the critic." Leo Tolstoy

"Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward…" Franz Kafka

"The first rule, indeed by itself virtually a sufficient condition for good style, is to have something to say." Arthur Schopenhauer

"Suspect all your favorite sentences." Kenneth Atchity

"Don't overwrite description in a story - you haven't got time."Elizabeth Spencer

"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
Somerset Maugham

"Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style." Matthew Arnold

"…writing comes more easily if you have something to say."Sholem Asch

"You fail only if you stop writing." Ray Bradbury

"Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing…."Bernard Malamud 

"Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to." Somerset Maugham
"Thoughts fly and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer." Julien Green

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Thomas Mann

"…therein is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident." H.L. Mencken

"Take away the art of writing from this world, and you will probably take away its glory." Chateaubriand

"You must write for yourself, above all. That is [your] only hope of creating something beautiful." Gustave Flaubert 

"Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together." Buffon

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make." Truman Capote

"I always do the first line well, but I have trouble with the others." Moliere

"A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment." William Sansom 

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." F. Scott Fitzgerald 

"You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else." Grace Paley 

"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else." Gloria Steinem 

Excerpts from 'How to be Perfect' by Ron Padgett!

Get some sleep.

Eat an orange every morning.

Be friendly. It will help make you happy.

Hope for everything. Expect nothing.

Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room
before you save the world. Then save the world.
Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly.

Don't stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don't
forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm's length
and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass 
ball collection.

Wear comfortable shoes.

Do not spend too much time with large groups of people.

Plan your day so you never have to rush.

Show your appreciation to people who do things for you, even if
you have paid them, even if they do favors you don't want.

After dinner, wash the dishes.

Calm down.

Don't expect your children to love you, so they can, if they want 
to.

Don't be too self-critical or too self-congratulatory.

Don't think that progress exists. It doesn't.

Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don't do
anything to make it impossible.

Forgive your country every once in a while. If that is not 
possible, go to another one.

If you feel tired, rest.

Don't be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel 
even older. Which is depressing.

Do one thing at a time.

If you burn your finger, put ice on it immediately. If you bang
your finger with a hammer, hold your hand in the air for 20
minutes. you will be surprised by the curative powers of ice and
gravity.

Do not inhale smoke.

Take a deep breath.

Do not smart off to a policeman.

Be good.

Be honest with yourself, diplomatic with others.

Do not go crazy a lot. It's a waste of time. 

Drink plenty of water. When asked what you would like to 
drink, say, "Water, please."

Take out the trash.

Love life.

Use exact change.

When there's shooting in the street, don't go near the window.

More astounding advice for writers, new and old, from Chazz Writes!

1. Be weird. Draw outside the lines. Live larger. Be different. If you can’t dare to be a little strange, or stranger, you sound too much like everyone else and there’s quite enough of that. Does your book’s title sound like all the other titles in its genre? Yes? You’re already boring me, mate, and I say that with love. Be three times more daring and ten times more clever.


2. Don’t write what you know. If we all did that, where would science fantasy be? Instead, write what you care about. You’ll get enough research to fill in the holes if you care enough to give your story verisimilitude. It’s always more about relationships, characters and action than it is about the guts of your ship’s stardrive engines, anyway.


3. Lose your thesaurus. You don’t need more words to tell me the story. The right words are the ones that come to you right away. If you use the word “epigonation”, you’re showing off and annoying your reader. A stupid thing to do, especially when you wanted to sound more intelligent. That must have been your aim because, unless you are sending your books back through a time tunnel to the time of Christ, you certainly weren’t trying for clarity in your reader’s mind.


4. Spam me. I don’t mind you telling me about your books one bit. I might be interested and I like to know what my options are. If you hit me over the head too much, of course I’ll ignore or unfollow you, but that doesn’t mean you should be silent. That means be clever and funny and engaging and giving most of the time. Lights are not for hiding under bushels. Light that bushel on fire and throw illumination.


5. Get into fights on the Internet. If you are getting along with everyone all the time, you’ve either got nothing to say or you’ve got no spine. Neither attribute attracts me to what else you might have to say within your book. I’m not advocating douchebaggery or fighting for fighting’s sake. Instead, have the courage to disagree with idiots while pretending to be civil and acting as if you don’t want them dead. We all know the truth.


6. Tell, don’t show. I know, I know. Somebody’s head just exploded and no amount of repainting ever covers up that mess. However, in grown up writing class, we encounter circumstances where telling is sometimes more appropriate. It saves the reader time and skips over stuff the reader doesn’t care about so we can get to the good stuff. Be more Elmore Leonard. Be less mime. Tell when you need to. Show when you need to. There aren’t rules, only guidelines. Learning all the rules before you break them? Sounds like a waste of time on a detour, doesn’t it? Instead, just write what works and stop mucking about.


7. Strangle your strict inner grammarian. If you write for clarity, that will cover most grammar rules, anyway. Some people are still holding on to stuff from eighth grade simply because it’s what they learned in eighth grade. The rest of us are splitting infinitives with wild, naked abandon, ending sentences with prepositions and using the word “hopefully” like a normal human (i.e. technically historically wrong) — and we don’t care. And sentence fragments? Rock! Common parlance trumps grammar. If it didn’t, none of us would communicate the way we do now. Strict grammarians fantasize about a language that isn’t organic and instead is frozen in amber from Dickensian England. They’re nuts. If language could freeze (and therefore die), we’d all still be angry cave people, grunting and pointing like New Yorkers in a Brooklyn deli.


8. Stop rewriting. I’m talking about your first chapter. You’re never going to get your book finished that way. Plunge! Get your atomic turbines to speed, Batman! Write and keep moving forward. Write like I’ll chase you in my Mustang with a twelve-gauge full of rock salt if you don’t finish two chapters tonight. (Because I will.) Rewriting is for later. A first chapter, endlessly written  and rewritten to perfection, does not a book make. Rewriting too soon is a formula for you, drooling on your deathbed, wondering if you should have taken out that comma on page three, and then put it back one more time before all trace of your existence is erased and there’s no book as evidence you ever were, you zero legacy stiff!


9. Stop reading old classics and start watching more movies and reading more comic books. Your english professor thinks Hemingway is the shit because that’s what he was taught in 1980. This is generational data lag. If you insist on classics, read: Crime and Punishment (so dates will think you’re deeper than you are); Hemingway’s short stories (not his novels); Portnoy’s Complaint to instil the value of a sense of humour in literature (a rare thing, that); A Confederacy of Dunces (for douchebag cred with hot Lit. majors at the dean’s cocktail parties and the nerdy chick at the bookstore) and Catcher in the Rye (in case the writing thing doesn’t work out and you turn to the next logical career choice: serial killer.) And nothing at all from Ayn Rand. Nothing! You have nothing to learn from her unless you’re going for what not to write, do, think or be.


Why movies and comic books? Because you need to make your storytelling more visual. (Hint: If most of your “action” takes place in a suburban living room much like your own, think harder. If you’re writing a certain kind of literary fiction that demands domestic ennui and the reader’s patience (yes, the reader — as in one reader — your mom), at least spice it up somehow. Make your main character do their sensitive contemplation by the river (so they can fall in or throw themselves in or get thrown in by a helpful plot enhancer). Or put them in the kitchen, next to the handy knife block so we get a sense that something might actually happen. Events must occur!


10. Stop writing huge, ambitious books. Write shorter books and make it a series so you have hope of making some money.


11. Write for the money. You think love and passion will get you through a whole book? No. There will come a time when you hit a wall, figuratively and literally, with your manuscript. Maybe you won’t want to do one more draft or you won’t have the energy to get up early and write another chapter. Screw that weak, loser talk. If you’re writing with the hope you’ll make some money some day, you get up. You’ll go the extra clichéd mile to yank out the clichés from your manuscript like black, seething tumours. Your kid wants to see Disney before she’s too tall for the rides. Your other kid wants to finally get an iPod for his birthday since he’s the last of his friends to get one. (Ooh, that one hits close to home.) Write for money because you need it. Write for money because, if it’s just a pleasant hobby, what’s at stake when the going gets rough?


12. Pay attention to how much better every other indie author is doing than you. Get angry, envious and jealous of those talentless, lucky hacks. The reasons are similar to #11. Take your ugly motivation wherever you can find it. (Notice I just told instead of showed — #6 — and you didn’t mind.)


13. Put references to popular culture in your books. Traditional publishers always eschewed that in manuscripts.  That’s why you have to infer so much about pop culture from old novels instead of knowing specifically what people paid attention to. The worry was that contemporary references to movies and issues would date the book. I can’t imagine why. What’s modern now will be a period piece in the future. So what? They might sell more books if they paid attention to what served the story and what was most entertaining instead of sticking to rules from from Lit. 101. (See #9) It works for John Locke’s readership.


14. Stop confusing process with product (Part 1). Neo-Luddites who wax poetic about the feel of a paper book are fetishizing the medium of dead trees over the book’s content and are possibly high on glue from all that sniffing. For people who claim they value the written word so much,  they seem overly concerned about the package it’s wrapped in. It’s fine to prefer a paperback to an ebook, but expect to pay more for the privilege and, by Thor’s hammer, stop whining to authors of ebooks about your fetish! When’s the last time you went out of your way to tell a used car salesman you think he’s shifty even though you weren’t buying a car from him anyway? What purpose does complaining serve if you never intend to buy our books? If you don’t want ebooks, then don’t buy them and don’t feel you have to tell me about it. We’re getting creeped out. (Alternative: buy my paperbacks, too.)


15. Stop confusing process with product (Part 2). Last week somebody called someone else a hack because he advocated writing fast. (No, it wasn’t me who was called out, though I have advocated writing faster if you’re up for it.) It’s the writing snob’s equivalent to a George Carlin joke: “Anybody driving slower than you is an idiot and anyone driving faster is a maniac!”


The mistaken subtext here is to think that anyone writing more quantity than you must be suffering in the Quality Assurance Department of the Writer’s Brain. Consider that A. Slow writing is no guarantee of quality, either. B. What counts is the end product, not the speed with which it arrived. (The slow writing advocate in this case admitted she hadn’t actually read any of The Speedy Author’s books, so she was letting her ass talk too much, wasn’t she? C. If someone else can write faster than you and you resent them for it, that might be jealousy talking. (See #12) Or D. Maybe you just aren’t as smart as The Speedy Author, you prejudiced dummy.


16. Wait for inspiration before you write because less competition would be great for me. Oh. For you? Not so much.


17. Offend your family. Disguise them, but use them. If they didn’t want you to use all of that useful childhood trauma, they should have been nicer when they had the chance. That time you got locked in the closet after the unjust beating? That’s rich writerly soil, right there. Rename your brother Larry so he’s Harry in the book. That ought to do it. Larry’s a moron.


18. Start building your author platform long before you need it and don’t whine that it’s hard. Your book is a loudspeaker. Without a platform, your loudspeaker is pointed at empty stands in a cavernous stadium. You don’t want to do this. Why do you think that matters?


19. In fact, hey, that’s another rule! No whining, period! Nothing worth doing is going to be easy. Besides, it’s unattractive. I once stopped watching a blog because a writer felt people weren’t grateful enough for her words. Gratitude is great (see yesterday’s author blog challenge post, below) but demanding unending thanks when you really haven’t done that much in the first place is petty narcissism. Writing professionally is about generous narcissism.


20. Stop reading Writers Digest and Publishers Weekly. There’s nothing in a paper magazine you can’t get in pixels faster and cheaper. WD is a holdover from traditional publishing and that’s why their advice is still weighted toward agents and the New York cadre. Those are lengthy pursuits with questionable ends that eat up your life. It’s procrastination in the guise of relevance and productivity. It’s patriarchal, systemic paralysis by matriarchal, editorial analysis. Chasing slush pile dreams is what my friend, author Al Boudreau, refers to as “dinosaur hunting”. (Brilliant, yes?)


As for all that crap in Publishers Weekly that spouts everything you need to know about traditional publishing? That’s all stuff you never need to know before you have a book written and probably not even then. What possible difference could knowing the industry make when they only ever talk to themselves? They talk too much about trad publishing because that’s where the ads come from. It’s incestuous, out of date and out of touch. If you want to know something about publishing that’s not out of date, read Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith and Passive Guy and Russell Blake and Jeff Bennington or even (for the love of Thor) this blog’s curations for that matter.


BONUS TIP: Instead of listening to the dinosaurs who refuse to see the meteor coming, be a contrarian. Contrarians are more interesting.


Wait.


What do you mean, you agree? What kind of contrarian are you, listening to some twit you don’t even know telling you, “My Top Twenty Best (Worst?) Advice for Authors”? As if I’m preaching the bloody sermon on the Mount! What kind of nonsense is that? Go ahead and write and make your own mistakes and write your own rules.


This blog post was for, as they say, “entertainment purposes only.”


Does anybody really learn anything much from another person’s mistakes?


For anything that really matters, you have to make those life altering mistakes for yourself.


I’m not your dad. I’m another writer, tap dancing for change.


Check out more Chazz Writes by clicking here!

The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats.

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#2: You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won't see what the story is actually about til you're at the end of it. Now rewrite.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You'll feel like you're losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

#8: Finish your story, let go even if it's not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

#9: When you're stuck, make a list of what WOULDN'T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you've got to recognize it before you can use it.

#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you'll never share it with anyone.

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it's poison to the audience.

#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What's the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That's the heart of it.

#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don't succeed? Stack the odds against.

#17: No work is ever wasted. If it's not working, let go and move on - it'll come back around to be useful later.

#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d'you rearrange them into what you DO like?

#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can't just write ‘cool'. What would make YOU act that way?

#22: What's the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

*Special thanks to i09*

I don't need motivation to read these Motivational (and Demotivational) Posters.

Slow down, you move too fast. We're all going to end up at the same place anyway.

Let's be honest, ladies.

This certainly doesn't apply to me, but you know who you are out there!

Creative people love getting advice. Here's some now!