Writing Effort Quotes

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

Fiction is always really a labor.

When I wrote "Win," it only took about eight months, but eight months of sheer pain and suffering because every phrase that's in there - and there are about 130 specific linguistic recommendations - I had to test every one to make sure that it worked.

My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once said that easy reading is damn hard writing.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

It is easier to rewrite anything - even the worst writing in the world - than it is to write something from scratch.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

It would probably take me an hour to two to write it down, get the feel of it, and that's with quite a few changes. It's not really a hard thing for me to do.

In terms of people who want to be writers, I wish more people knew how much work it was.

Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.

Subject is very important. If you're going to write non-fiction the style means nothing or very little. The content justifies the effort you need to put into the writing itself.

Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.

I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.

I work real hard so the reader doesn't have to. I don't want them to have to look up words.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

Writing, for me at least, takes a lot of concentrated work and effort. It takes dedication and the willingness to do the work even when that feeling of inspiration isn't there at all.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.