Bob Shacochis Quotes

Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.

If you have to go back and spell-check the text you're about to send, you're saying too much.

Tweeting has taught me the discipline to say more with fewer words.

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.

Let us not write at a loose rambling rate, in hope the world will wink at all our faults.

You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.

I have the exact opposite problem of every writer I've ever met: Every writer I've ever met writes things that are too long, and they have to edit them down.

The great art of writing is knowing when to stop.

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

Writing is hard work, and fun, and requires you to keep your backside in a chair when you would sometimes like to put it elsewhere. So the only wisdom is the advice to keep at it, I guess.

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

The point of good writing is knowing when to stop.

All through my career I've written 1,000 words a day - even if I've got a hangover. You've got to discipline yourself if you're professional. There's no other way.

The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.

I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story.

I'd write over and over, 'I will not throw into coverage.'

[Writing] is edit, edit, edit. It's almost like getting a boat ready to go to sea. You've still got a countless number of things left to fix, but you've just got to go, "O.K., everybody get on the boat. We're going, ready or not."

Of all the disciplines involved in making anything - TV, film or anything I do - the writing is the most valuable commodity.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

What I love about the thriller form is that it makes you write a story. You can't get lost in your own genius, which is a dangerous place for writers. You don't want to ever get complacent. If a book starts going too well, I usually know there's a problem. I need to struggle. I need that self-doubt. I need to think it's not the best thing ever.

It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.

If you're going to be a writer you should sit down and write in the morning, and keep it up all day, every day. Charles Bukowski, no matter how drunk he got the night before or no matter how hungover he was, the next morning he was at his typewriter. Every morning. Holidays, too. He'd have a bottle of whiskey with him to wake up with, and that's what he believed. That's the way you became a writer: by writing. When you weren't writing, you weren't a writer.

Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It's the only thing you can control.

I don't know what it is that makes a writer go to his desk in his shut-off room day after day after year after year unless it is the sure knowledge that not to have done the daily stint of writing that day is infinitely more agonizing than to write.