Writing Constraints Quotes

In a novel, you have space to develop a character or a scene. You don't have that luxury in a 700-800-word picture book.

If you give a writer a pile of blank paper and say you can write anything you like on any subject you want at any length you want, you will probably never get anything at all, whereas if you have 900 words to write, and it's fiction that is somehow op-ed fiction, and it needs to tie in with Halloween . . . okay, those are my constraints, that's where I now need to start building something.

There are certain things I couldn't write because they're not intrinsic to my beliefs. For instance, I couldn't write a hero or heroine who didn't put children first.

Headline writing is tough because often times you are given a predetermined number of spaces and words depending on the layout and the type of the story.

I never want to feel constrained by writing a novel for a specific audience.

I think that happens for a lot of people, they have this idea that there's only one type of way to write poetry and that you have to have this information. You have to know about meter, you have to know about form, you have to know about iambic pentameter, and all of that.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

Whenever you write for someone else, you're always aware - sometimes overtly, other times at an almost cellular, subliminal level - of the rules about what you can and can't do.

We do not write as we want, but as we can.

As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.

So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?

Writing might be unalloyed joy, were it not for the fact that power is always shadowed by responsibility. Thankfully, the absolute power that writers have is not weighted down with absolute responsibility. It can neither be suppressed nor diminished, except by choice.

You can't write anything you want. Once you write that first chapter, then everything else is determined. You can write anything you want, but only one thing works.

You can't write a character more brilliant than yourself. It's just not physically possible.

Writers of color are given certain messages - explicit or implicit - about what they're allowed to write about or what will be successful if they write about it. And white writers are given another set of implicit and, sometimes, explicit messages.

I think I'm a difficult conventional writer.

No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.

The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

That freedom of writing you don't get in other formats, I'd rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.