Collected Quotes

Writing quotes - those marginally useful tidbits you look up when you're trying to figure out why you aren't writing and you know you should be. Or is that just me? Here's my offering of the reminders that send me back to the page in a guilty scurry.

 

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. Toni Morrison

This one is first because this one is how writing happened for me. Itty bitty library and no loan system, so after I’d read through the science fiction/fantasy section, there was nothing left to read. But Mom had an old Selectric typewriter. I found paper. And despite the fact that I couldn’t type to save my life (I was 12) I started writing the grandest, least likely yarn ever conceived by a preteen brain. Pirates. Princesses. Horses. Sword fights. A black panther! Yeah. Like I said. I was 12. The story making any kind of logical sense was just not a thing. But spending my summer in front of that typewriter pecking out word after word stoked a fire that never quite went out. Believe me. I’ve tried to put it out. Writing doesn’t die when I try to put out the fire, little bits of me do instead. So I quit fighting it and I write. Mostly.

A word after a word after a word is power. Margaret Atwood 

I love Margaret Atwood. This pithy sentence gets at the whole writing conundrum: It can only be done word by word by word – and some days that is torturous – but that way great and powerful magic is unleashed. Word by word, you build worlds. People who didn’t exist before. Entire universes and lives. If you’re lucky, those words go out into this world and affect real lives here and now. If that’s not power, I don’t know what is. You know the cliché. With great power comes great responsibility. This is the same. You have a responsibility to your story, to your readers and to yourself. And when I say ‘you’, I mean ‘I’. I need the reminder.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things. Ray Bradbury

Another vital reminder for me because I excel at overthinking shit. It’s my damned super power. (Seeking a super power trade – anyone?) It’s part of why I do NaNoWriMo just about every year – not that I ever win. Won’t this year, either. But the artificial ‘deadline’ of 50k words in a month makes me go faster than I’m usually comfortable with. Sometimes it works. The first pubbed book was a NaNo book. Sometimes it doesn’t work. This year’s NaNo project is wandering in the weeds with no point and notably no conflict. So I stopped. But I didn’t stop. In taking the pressure of WRITE ALL THE WORDS off, I paused to look at what I had and at where I might want to go. Some stuff got pulled into clarity and now, it’s back to 2k a day. No more thinking. Doing. Because that’s the only way stories ever get told. By doing. One word after another.

Writing Quotes

This one, I admit has no cited 

quoter (is that a word?) but I like it

so here it is...

Write me like you'd want me to write you

Getting the Words Write: Three Favorite Quotes about Writing

A very special bordello welcome to our guest blogger Jenn Stark, Urban Fantasy Author, whose latest novel Wilde Card releases today!

Hello and a special thank you to Kristine for hosting me today at Word Whores! I’m excited to be here to celebrate my launch of WILDE CARD, book 2 in my Urban Fantasy Immortal Vegas series. This topic also allowed me to indulge in procrastination-by-quote-sites, since I wasn’t sure that my favorite quotes were the most awesome ones out there. Research was needed!

At long last, however, I settled on the top three. The first one isn’t a quote specifically about writing (actually, only one of my three quotes is!), but it’s the one that’s been a guiding force for me since I first heard it.

“Real artists ship.” —Steve Jobs

Regardless of what you think about Steve Jobs as a person, he was an incredible creative force. And the quote above, attributed to him, shows why: in Jobs’ mind, creating something beautiful or even extraordinary was not enough. You had to actually “ship” that work to market. You had to sell it, display it, get it into the hands of consumers, whatever it took to make your work public.

As authors, it’s easy for us to get caught up in the creative process, wanting to make something perfect. But a beautiful painting that is never displayed isn’t art, and a gorgeous manuscript that sits in a drawer isn’t art. They could be many other things: catharsis, meditation, healing, you name it. But they aren’t art, according to Steve Jobs (and, well, me). Art only becomes art when it is experienced by someone else.

So what does this mean for authors? Get the book done… and get the book out.

“Good writing is rewriting.” —Truman Capote

This quote resonates with me so much because of my particular writing process. As an author who publishes under three pen names (Urban Fantasy as Jenn Stark, Young Adult historical romance as Jennifer McGowan, and New Adult contemporary romance as Jennifer Chance), I have embraced the art of fast drafting. On a “normal” full-writing day, assuming I’m not trying to make up for lost time or writing blog posts, I can draft about 5,000 words. I know that some authors do much more than that! But for me, 5,000 is a good amount. With that speed, working five days a week, I can draft a typical (non-epic) manuscript in three weeks.

And then I have to edit.

As quickly as I draft, I have no problem recasting entire sections of a book, rewriting scenes, expanding or contracting plot points or deepening emotional motivation, all on the fly. Every time I go through a book, I change it, in some cases dramatically. I have to balance this process with the realization that I’m writing on a deadline, and ergo eventually the book has to get “shipped” (see quote above!). But I find that the important thing for me isn’t the writing… it’s the rewriting.

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” —Anais Nin

I’m not an expert on Anais Nin, by any means, but this quote struck the same chord with me as I suspect it does with many authors. I’ve always made my living and my life through writing. Do not ask me to perform simple mathematics, of course, but from my earliest childhood I have written my way to good grades, scholarship opportunities, jobs in branding and communications, the works.

None of that writing, though, has been as exhilarating and at times heartbreaking as my journey to become a published fiction author. Reclusive and conflict-avoidant by nature, I’ve found myself forced to grow and become stronger as a result of my desire to be a full-time author, eventually finding ways to share my stories via both traditional and now Indie publishing. I’m learning all the time—and still have so much to learn—but my lessons these days are not just about craft. They’re about strengthening my voice, both the one on the page and the one that whispers in my ear, telling me to take the next leap. It’s an amazing process, and one I hope to continue for a long time to come.

Being an author is not an easy job, but it’s the only job I want. I’m grateful every day that I get to work with words. And to borrow a John Buchan quote favored by my first mentor, Terry Maley, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”

So what about you? If you have a favorite quote, list it below and explain why—or consider creating your own Top 3 List!

Jenn Stark is an award-winning author of paranormal romance and urban fantasy. She lives and writes in Ohio. In addition to her new "Immortal Vegas" urban fantasy series, she is also author Jennifer McGowan, whose Maids of Honor series of Young Adult Elizabethan spy romances are published by Simon & Schuster, and author Jennifer Chance, whose Rule Breakers series of New Adult contemporary romances are published by Random House/LoveSwept and whose new modern royals series, Gowns & Crowns, is now available. 

You can find her online at www.jennstark.com, follow her on Twitter @jennstark, and visit her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/authorjennstark.

Three Inspiring Thoughts on Writing

Before I share my three favorite quotes about writing, I have to twirl a bit over my big news this week. THE TALON OF THE HAWK was nominated for Best Fantasy Romance of 2015 in the RT Book Reviews Reviewers Choice Awards! I'm so honored to be in the company of such amazing writers, many of whom are my very favorites from way back. Such a thrill!

My three favorite quotes about writing.

There is in each of us an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground around it into a swamp. ~Mark Rutherford

I found this quote in the book WALKING ON ALLIGATORS, a book of meditations for writers, by Susan Shaunghnessy, which I bought back in 1993 when I first set my cap to being a writer instead of (or, in addition to, as it turned out) being a scientist. I've come back to this quote over and over, to explain to myself why I get depressed if my breaks from writing are too long. Ye olde swamp. Yes, exactly.

Tons of great quotes in that book - I highly recommend!

Take the donuts!

Okay, if you haven't read Amanda Palmer's THE ART OF ASKING, you won't get this. Also, this is an amazing book for any kind of creative. Maybe for anyone at all! Seriously, this book lit up my life and answered questions I didn't even know I had. Anyway, she explains this so much better than I could, that I'm copying from the book. Some of this might not make sense because she references previous thought threads, but that's all the more reason to read the book!

Thoreau wrote in painstaking detail about how he chose to remove himself from society to live by his own means in a little ten-by-fifteen-foot hand-hewn cabin on the side of a pond. What he left out of Walden, though, was the fact that the land he built on was borrowed from his wealthy neighbor, that his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson had him over for dinner all the time, and that every Sunday, Thoreau’s mother and sister brought him a basket of freshly baked goods for him, including donuts.

The idea of Thoreau gazing thoughtfully over the expanse of transcendental Walden Pond, a bluebird alighting onto his threadbare shoe, all the while eating donuts that his mom brought him just doesn’t jibe with most people’s picture of him as a self-reliant, noble, marrow-sucking back-to-the-woods folk hero. In the book An Underground Education, Richard Zacks declares: Let it be known that Nature Boy went home on weekends to raid the family cookie jar.

Thoreau also lived at Walden for a total of two or three years, but he condensed the book down to a single year, the four seasons, to make the book flow better, to work as a piece of art, and to best reflect his emotional experience.

Taking the donuts is hard for a lot of people.

It’s not the act of taking that’s so difficult, it’s more the fear of what other people are going to think when they see us slaving away at our manuscript about the pure transcendence of nature and the importance of self-reliance and simplicity. While munching on someone else’s donut.

Maybe it comes back to that same old issue: we just can’t see what we do as important enough to merit the help, the love. Try to picture getting angry at Einstein devouring a donut brought to him by his assistant while he sat slaving on the theory of relativity. Try to picture getting angry at Florence Nightingale for snacking on a donut while taking a break from tirelessly helping the sick. It’s difficult.

So, a plea.

To the artists, creators, scientists, nonprofit-runners, librarians, strange-thinkers, start-uppers, and inventors, to all people everywhere who are afraid to accept the help, in whatever form it’s appearing:

Please, take the donuts.

To the guy in my opening band who was too ashamed to go out into the crowd and accept money for his band:

Take the donuts.

To the girl who spent her twenties as a street performer and stripper living on less than $700 a month, who went on to marry a best-selling author whom she loves, unquestioningly, but even that massive love can’t break her unwillingness to accept his financial help, please…

Everybody.

Please.

Just take the fucking donuts.

And my most recent favorite, that I have tacked up next to my desk:

What would you write if you weren't afraid?

This one isn't cited to anyone that I can find. It's interesting because when I mention it to some people, they come right back with "I'm not afraid of anything!" Which is great. More power to them. Other people though, particularly well-established, multi-published authors, nod and say, "Oh, yes." It's not fear precisely, but that works well as a good umbrella term. It's caution. It's those voices of the marketplace whispering that something like it has been done. Or has never been done. It's the comments of critique partners warning that readers won't like something. It's the ever-present doubt in one's own instincts.

Whenever I hesitate on going somewhere in a story, I look a that quote.

And I write as if I'm not afraid.