Writer's Craft Quotes

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.

Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.

I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read.

Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.

Every writer has to write his speech.

Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.

The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.

A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.

There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.

Many writers profess great exactness in punctuation who never yet made a point.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

I think that successful writers somehow capture truths that resonate with readers.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

When you're learning, especially to write, unless you're some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the pieces. It gives you chops; it gives you moves.

Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

That's what ever great writer, I believe, has done over the course of time - is they've figured out new ways of telling the same stories.

A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.

Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.