Bad Writing Advice Quotes & Sayings

She knew that the only love her demon was capable of was self-destructive, cruel, vampiric, parasitic, and all the other words her best friends had used to describe Jerry, Alec, Christian, Matt, and the others whose names, faces, and genitalia had now blurred together in her memories. They were men incapable of love yet able to inspire suicide threats. — Nancy A. Collins

Don't apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it. — Walter Darby Bannard

Riffing on language will create wonderful effects you never intended. Which leads me to this writing advice: 'Always take credit for good stuff you didn't intend, because you'll be getting plenty of criticism in your career for bad stuff you didn't mean either.' — Roy Peter Clark

But starvation,
unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's
soul was rooted in his stomach — Bukowski

I'll be blasted', he said, 'if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself — Virginia Woolf

In school, you get a limited view of the world. Start working. Find your passion. Take your time doing that. Once you've found what you're passionate about, then lock down. Even if you want to start a business, it's helpful to work, see how other businesses are run. — Joe Mansueto

It's honestly a wonder that writing groups produce writers at all, instead of walking insecurities raised entirely in echo chambers of bad advice. — Brandon Sanderson

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories. — Paul Gallico

My advice is: to try and stay really true to the things that make YOU laugh, as opposed to trying to create a character that you think is funny. Some comedians get into bad habits when they are trying to create something that is not them, and they are trying to write a voice that isn't their true voice. — Dane Cook

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible. — Terri Windling

Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life. — James C. Collins

What you might see as depravity is, to me, just another aspect of the human condition. — Asia Argento

I am a very selfish person. — Lara Flynn Boyle

There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation. — Stephen King

Reality is not made of dreams, until you make them real. — Soar

In this new era of social media the rules of the road have changed significantly, yet the basic yearning for true connectivity and love have not. — Matthew Hussey

The best advice I ever got came from my mother, Estee Lauder: She believed that if you had something good to say, you should put it in writing. But if you had something bad to say, you should tell the person to his or her face. — Leonard Lauder

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers
namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out
don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams "yay" and jumps up and down for joy
when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. — Francine Prose

Sometimes we get discouraged and turn to inspirational writing, like stuff from Vince Lombardi: "Quitters never win and winners never quit." Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time. Most people quit. They just don't quit successfully. — Anonymous

Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Now you are ready to sub your first work.
Criticism is hard to take at first. Trust me, I've been there. But learn to think of crit marks as a knife. Each one is designed to cut away the bad and leave a scar. Scars prove you've lived, learned and walked away a winner. Any writer who tells you they don't need edits is lying. I don't care if they have 100 books out. Edits make you grow and if you aren't growing as a writer, you are dead. — Inez Kelley

Then I realized that I was falling victim to one of the fallacies of the bad reviewer (whose habits we already discussed at length in yesterday's commentary). I was wishing that Hamid had written a different book than he had. How I might have written this story is completely irrelevant. It would be like dismissing The Godfather because I wished it were a musical. The novel needs to be considered on its own terms. — Kevin Guilfoile

Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Remember: Bad timing equals great plot twists. — A.L. Mabry

Veep is the best and most realistic political TV show out there. — Christopher Michael Cillizza

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page. — Jodi Picoult

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either. — Kevin Henkes