Will Self Quotes

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.

I always tell my students to write the story all the way through, not to play with the language and fall in love with sentences that you then have to cut. I actually find that really difficult to do; there's something so demoralizing about looking at a pile of not very great sentences. As I ease into writing every morning, I tweak a sentence and then tweak a paragraph.

I think the best advice I got was to not worry about what other people would think while you were working on your first draft. Focus on getting it out of your head. You can always edit the manuscript later.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

I write every day. Most weekdays, I write about ten hours a day. That doesn't mean eight hours of surfing the Net or watching videos on YouTube. I park my butt in a chair and write... I learned that writer's block is a myth created by people who don't have, or understand, a writing process.

Get your butt in a chair and write. If it comes out weak or bad or clunky or ordinary, then accept that this happens to everyone. Everyone. Get it down, get it done, and fix it in the rewrite. Just like everyone from Stephen King to J. K. Rowling to Chuck Palahniuk does.

I write - and then I write some more.

Here's the secret to finishing that first book. Don't rewrite as you go.

Three hundred words in a day is not a lot. So much of it is thinking before writing. And then there's the cutting. But you do what you do and keep moving forward.

When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.

Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book.

I've had to really teach myself that when you're not feeling it, you shouldn't write anything down because you're going to end up coming back and re-writing it later. Whereas, if you write when you're feeling something, when you're really in the streak, then that's when you're going to get your best stuff.

I should be concentrating on writing pages.

I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.

I think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don't revise it once it's set down.

In a first draft, I concentrate on moving forward and trying not to panic.

When I'm writing a first draft of a script, I can disappear into that for two, three months exclusively.

I often get asked how I write so much. As any writer knows, the answer is to write a lot more than you actually publish.

I write an actual script rather quickly - a draft will take me two weeks - but I write a lot of drafts. My big thing is I don't re-read. When I write, I never re-read back. I'll send it, because if I re-read back, it will cripple me.

The space where writing happens is a unique space that's hard to define, and when you're kicked out of it because you're travelling or distracted, it seems so elusive and hard to defend because you yourself doubt whether it existed.

I'm the kind of writer that, once I get into writing mode in my brain, I'm non-stop.

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.

Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.

Editing while you're writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.