Slice of Life: Day 12: Words of Wisdom from Writers

After yesterday’s two-hour entry, I needed something shorter yet helpful for anyone (writer's specifically) that clicks my link. Following are quotes from people that have a proven track record of success. These are good nuggets for any kind of writer, whether a novelist, screenwriter or something else. I hope they give you something to think about.

 

From Stephen King’s On Writing:

 

·      Writing is like building a campfire; one by one, your characters must come out of the woods to help add onto the fire, onto the story.

·      Start with forcing yourself to write sentence by sentence until you get into a flow state.

·      Get immersed in your writing process until the outside world is gone.

 

From Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones:

 

·      Our senses by themselves are dumb. They take in experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through our whole bodies.

·      Don’t worry about your talent or capability: that will grow as your practice. So just practice writing, and when you learn to trust your voice, direct it.

·      Life is so rich, and if you can write down the real details of the ways things were and are, you hardly need anything else.

 

From Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird:

 

·     It's easy to get lost in the noise of trying to do everything and any technique that will help you narrow down your options and find a few points of focus is valuable not just in writing but in life.

·      All good writers start with (bad) first drafts. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.

·      Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden, everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. 

 

From Robert McKee’s Story:

·      You reveal a character’s hidden nature by putting them under pressure.

·      Desire in your character is key. (They need to have a goal.)

·    When you don’t know what to write about, ask yourself what your favorite movies are and why they are your favorite.

·     Draw the audience in with empathy and curiosity, and let them indirectly gather exposition as they go along, rather than overwhelming them with it.

 

From Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat:

·      Why is this “the most important adventure that ever happened to the hero of this movie”? One way to judge is to check out if the beginning and the end are opposites; is the “snapshot of the world before” this adventure begins and the “snapshot of the world after” so different, so breathtakingly bi-polar that we know for sure we’ve been somewhere? And know we’ll never be the same?

·      What is this “about”? What is the moral of the story? And more important, did we have a brush with the divine? This, to me, is what it really comes down to. Did we see a “supernatural power” at work in this story that lifts it—and us—beyond our ordinary selves and gives us cavemen a new way to look at the world in an inspired way? It doesn’t have to be “Use the force, Luke!”; it can be the divine of a friendship unearned yet granted to us anyway, a last-minute reprieve before the sentence we deserve is carried out, or a simple kiss from the girl we never expected to have faith in us, who bestows the courage we need to be what we did not think possible.

-rg