Jason Molina Quotes

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

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.

I try very hard to write the best book I possibly can, every time.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.

I would be miserable if I went to bed without having written 1,000 words about something.

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.

My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

I write every day.

I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

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.

When I need the idea, I can find it immediately. I have a horror of rewriting or deleting; the parts of my composition are carried in my head 'till I can write them down, even to the last note. Then I do not alter a jot.

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

It takes me ages to write stuff.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8 A.M. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain.