Top 1200 Story Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

But I think writing should be a bit of a struggle. We're not writing things that are going to change the world in big ways. We're writing things that might make people think about people a little bit, but we're not that important. I think a lot of writers think we are incredibly important. I don't feel like that about my fiction. I feel like it's quite a selfish thing at heart. I want to tell a story. I want someone to listen to me. And I love that, but I don't think I deserve the moon on a stick because I do that.

My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.

There's a certain amount of pressure that goes with writing superhero characters, especially characters that are beloved to audiences. You know that you're always writing into a certain amount of expectations and into an existing fandom, and I try to take the pressure of that in when I first accept a project and then I try to push it aside as much as possible and just focus on the story that I want to tell. It's definitely a little more pressure than writing something of your own, from your own brain, and creating those expectations from scratch. But I also like the challenge of it.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step toward it.

When it comes to actually writing the book/story, I work on a computer. I wish I could write longhand, but I can't.

Kids, if anything, are harder to write for because they are a more discerning audience. They will not stay with you if you go off on a tangent or if you give them extraneous information that doesn't serve the story. You really have to tell a tight story. You have to give them humor and suspense and believable characters. All those things that adults want too, but you have to be really on your game when you're writing for kids.

Music is, by far, the best art. Nothing even comes close. It's so immediate and emotional. In writing, maybe ninety percent of it is the unconscious and ten percent is control. In music, I think it's probably more like ninety-nine percent the unconscious. It's just a beautiful thing happening through you. And so, too, is writing a great story.

The one thing that's missing from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, and I don't imagine we'll see it any time soon, is that there's no memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died because of how the memory of 9/11 was used. Memory is a very interesting thing. We very selectively curate our story and then stop when it begins to tell other people's stories and forces us to accept some kind of culpability. One reason I write is that there's not enough Muslims writing, Pakistanis writing, not enough people of faith writing about the complexities of our experiences.

I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer because I wrote many of the short stories in one sitting or over maybe three days, and they didn't change that much. There weren't many, many drafts. That made me feel semi-brilliant and part of a magical process. Writing the novel wasn't like that. I would come home every day from my office and say, "Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written." At that point, I didn't realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

I get hundreds of emails daily and a lot of feedback from people that are reading or have read my books. When I'm writing, or in my daily life, I just think of the work. I love to tell a story, but I might work with a story to make it the best I can without thinking of how many people will read it or if it will influence anybody.

We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin.

To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.

My greatest strength as a writer is that I'm a storyteller. But, it was a long, hard struggle for me to make the transition from verbally telling stories to writing them. You'll note I don't dwell on descriptions in my writing, because I'm far more interested in telling the story. There are many better writers in this world, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone more passionate about stories than I am.

A photographer is like a writer... you're writing with your lens so make sure you tell a good story.

I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.

Take the story of Cain and Abel. Why were we given that story? Scientifically, you may have an explanation for it, but I'm not approaching it from the scientific point of view. I'm saying: Why do we need that? It's a sordid story, a depressing story, a dark story. Why should I believe that I'm a descendant of either Cain or Abel? Thank God there is a third son! [Genesis 4:25]

People don't know what to do when writing a story with teens that takes place now - they think you have to make a bunch of references to Facebook.

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.

I do think reading is the best practice for writing, along with writing all the time. I actually never liked writing on my own or in school until I'd had my blog for a while and realized I'd been writing every day for years.

I remember my dad working with me on breaking down my script and writing out a back story for my character and all that stuff.

Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood.

Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort.

My writing process is consecutive, like, 'mad scientist' crazy. It's not totally writing something that rhymes or even writing a rap necessarily. Sometimes it's just writing down stuff that I'm going through.

I think striking the right tone for your story is, if you like, the alchemical work of writing.

Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight.

I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.

Each piece of writing I undertake, whether a story, novel, play, or poem, begins with an image.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

No one on earth is so boring and insignificant that he or she is not worth writing or reading about...One thing's for sure—no one but you can be the hero of your story.

The best part of writing is thinking about the story. And then everything else takes a lot of discipline.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

Try writing an entire story with only a thousand words at your disposal. It’s a terrific lesson in economy and precession.

In terms of 'Ray Donovan,' the story is so rich, the actors are so fantastic, the writing is impeccable. And it's such beautiful storytelling with complex characters.

I used to love to make things - you couldn't drag me away for dinner because I was always writing a story or something.

I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.

The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling;the comic and the witty story upon the matter.

That's one thing brands are understanding is, I'm the blogger who's not writing about fashion. I'm not writing about beauty. I'm not writing about gossip. I'm not writing about politics. I'm writing about all of that. I'm the person they can come to if they just want to reach people who care and have their fingers on pop culture.

For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. It is nothing more than this.

The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.

One thing about writing 'The Sarah Silverman Program' was the concern that I don't give myself the best story, you know what I mean?

I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.

As I was writing 'Insidious 3' I started to fall in love with the characters and the story. I became very possessive of it and I didn't want someone else to do it.

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.

This fear is one of the horrors of an author's life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation? I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, 'How could you dare write that story, it's the most frightening work I have ever read.' I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

Sometimes, a writer 'character' is just a projection of a person who is writing the story, but not necessarily 'me.'

One of the things you learn very early in writing for television, especially, is that compressing the story is always a good idea.

A novel compared to film writing can allow the author to be more indulgent, and that extends to the characters and the story being told.

Words matter, particularly when you're writing a story that could significantly damage a person's or an organization's reputation.

The thing to remember when you're writing," he said, " is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader. I don't care what literary device you might use, or belief systems you tap into--if you can make a story true for the reader, if you can give them a glimpse into another way of seeing the world, or another way that they can cope with their problems, then that story is a succes.