Starting To Write Quotes & Sayings

I used to write in bed, starting when I woke up. I believe that creative work comes from our subconscious mind, so I try to keep the gap between sleep and writing as minimal as possible. — Marian Keyes

I sort of always like to write starting with when I learned how. — Daniel Pinkwater

I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long ... That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is ... like fireworks. — Anton Chekhov

When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write. — James Franco

Then you get the wrong answer and you can't go to the Moon that way! Nature isn't a person, you can't trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it's made of cheese you can argue for days and it won't change the Moon! What you're talking about is rationalization, like starting with a sheet of paper, moving straight down to the bottom line, using ink to write 'and therefore, the Moon is made of cheese', and then moving back up to write all sorts of clever arguments above. But either the Moon is made of cheese or it isn't. The moment you wrote the bottom line, it was already true or already false. Whether or not the whole sheet of paper ends up with the right conclusion or the wrong conclusion is fixed the instant you write down the bottom line. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn. — Barry Unsworth

I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes. — Erica Jong

I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn't have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn't that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write? — Ann Patchett

Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it. S. J. Perelman told me that when he was starting out he could have been arrested for imitating Ring Lardner. Woody Allen could have been arrested for imitating S. J. Perelman. And who hasn't tried to imitate Woody Allen? Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else's writing. They think it's unethical - which is commendable. Or they're afraid they'll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become. But — William Zinsser

the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. Often — Rebecca Solnit

If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own. — Judith Barrington

For someone who is starting out on developing their critical skills, just being aware of its existence is great: it can make the difference between trying to write a story around a cliche or an original idea, and better still, studying it can eventually clue you in on how to breathe new life into tired tropes. — Charles Stross

But the paradox of their success is that most modern readers are unaware of the overwhelming obstacles both women had to overcome. Without knowing the history of the era, the difficulties Wollstonecraft and Shelley faced are largely invisible, their bravery incomprehensible. Both women were what Wollstonecraft termed "outlaws." Not only did they write world-changing books, they broke from the strictures that governed women's conduct, not once but time and again, profoundly challenging the moral code of the day. Their refusal to bow down, to subside and surrender, to be quiet and subservient, to apologize and hide, makes their lives as memorable as the words they left behind. They asserted their right to determine their own destinies, starting a revolution that has yet to end. — Charlotte Gordon

I sat down and tried to write a story.
"Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight."
That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one. After cleaning my room three times, I decided to leave Ian alone for a while because I was starting to get mad at him. — Stephen Chbosky

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. — Ernest Hemingway,

I think when we were starting out, it was more about imitating our songwriting heroes. We would try to write songs like Neil Finn, or we would try to write songs like Ray Davies, or we would try to write songs like Glenn Tilbrook. — Adam Schlesinger

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.
As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write.
As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall.
As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun. — Stephen King

It's a job. Get up and do it every day. Show up. Don't say no. Taylor Swift was the third write of my day every week. If I had gone home or said Ah, man. I'm tired today. I'm not going to write at 4 o'clock in the afternoon with a teenager.' If I had done that, just think. Keep an open mind. Everybody has something to come into the room with and when you're starting out, try everything. You might find your magical writing partner. — Liz Rose

I took many notes, more than usual before I sat down and wrote Act One, Scene One. I had perhaps eighty pages of notes ... I was so prepared that the script seemed inevitable. It was almost all there. I could almost collate it from my notes. The story line, the rather tenuous plot we have, seemed to work out itself. It was a very helpful way to write, and it wasn't so scary. I wasn't starting with a completely blank page. — Charles Busch

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy - I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically. — Pete Seeger

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. — Ernest Hemingway,

I write plays, and I have a musical that's starting to get produced now. That's what I would love to do, but it's so hard. The only reason people are reading my plays and musicals is because I'm in movies. — Jesse Eisenberg

I'm convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people will acknowledge. I also know the price that must be paid. It's a real struggle to do it. It requires visualization and affirmation. It involves living a life of integrity, starting with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition are ultimately integrated and harmonized. — Stephen Covey

To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage. — Edward Albee

You should write a novel." "Me? Write a novel?" "Well, you do read a lot of them." "And you eat a lot of candy bars, but I don't see you running out to hire a bunch of Oompa-Loompas and starting a chocolate factory. — Tammy Blackwell

I want to create a rapid response team, right around the world, perhaps starting originally with our partners, similar to the one we have in the United Nations whereby, where there's a problem in our society which demands a compassionate response, an educated, informed, not just a splurgy emotional thing, but an informed compassionate response that puts yourself in the position of the other and sees all sides of the problem, not just your own, there'll be somebody poised in each society who can write to the media, write an op-ed piece, to go on TV or radio. — Karen Armstrong

We had just played a sold-out show and it had been a fun night when we heard the news. It brought everything back to reality. He was a brilliant guy. He was an aerospace engineer and an entrepreneur. We were just starting to write new songs two weeks after he died. We were still grieving. So that was naturally a big subject matter for the album. — Brendan Bayliss

Starting is hard so I really need to give myself permission to do a bad job. I always give myself leave to write total nonsense for as long as I need to release the pressure, because it's really hard to start if you feel like that first sentence you write has to actually mean something. — Ann Brashares

The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment ... that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?
... I do not maintain that prohibition of sex is a ruse; but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch. — Michel Foucault

I do write. I actually do want to start my music as well. My sister and I are starting a band. I've been playing a guitar for nine years, and she plays piano, and we sing together. We're going to start up something soon. I mostly am writing songs right now actually, but I would love to write a script someday. — Kaitlyn Dever

I do like to write about characters who aren't just starting out, who have had adventures before, who have had a past they aren't that happy looking back on. — Martha Wells

I started hitting best-seller lists as soon as I stopped using outlines. With Strangers, I started with nothing more than a couple of characters I thought I'd like and with a premise. Nearly every new writer I know uses detailed outlines, and so did I for a long time. But when I stopped relying on them, my work became less stiff, more organic, less predictable. BUT, nearly every beginning writer I've known and some excellent veterans as well, such as Jeffery Deaver, create chapter-by-chapter outlines of considerable length before starting to write the novel. The point of this tip is simply that if you feel constrained by an outline, it isn't the only way to work. — Dean Koontz

Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition. — Robert B. Parker

Sold my soul to the devil / for nice penmanship. / Now I write real pretty / but I'm starting to regret it. — Dan Mangan

The thing for someone just starting off [in writing] is to write. You need to have limber fingers, whether you write with your fingers or you type on your laptop, but you need to have a limber mind and you need to be able to write without judging what you've written, at least right away, and without editing right away. — Augusten Burroughs

When I was first starting out, I drove myself around the country in my Honda Civic, playing anywhere that would have me. This is a chance to strip the songs down to their roots and let the audience hear them the way I write them. — Eric Hutchinson

I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel. — Umberto Eco

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work. — Dean Koontz

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. — Howard Nemerov

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books. — Elizabeth Moon

Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult. — Damon Galgut

When I write what publishers call 'fantasy' I am writing in what I think is the most important tradition of fiction: starting with Homer and up through Shakespeare and Milton, the most important themes to tackle are those of the mythopoeic domain, tales of the body and mind seen through a temperament and a cosmos divorced from current reality so what is said can be more clear. — Janet Morris

I moved to Des Moines when I was 15. I asked my mother to give up costody and sign parental rights over to my grandmother, who I lived with while I went to school. I was clean and finally starting to figure myself out. I can only say that now without laughing. I was still very out of my own place, and I didn't even know what that place was. All I knew was that I could write music, that I had no idea what that could mean and that I was still surrounded by people I couldn't relate to. I hadn't found my tribe yet. — Corey Taylor

Unfortunately, many people suffer from BPS - Blank Page Syndrome. Let's face it: starting to write is scary. Seeing the cursor blinking at you on that bright white screen, realizing that you now have to come up with three or ten or twenty pages of text all on your own - it's enough to give anyone a major case of writer's block! — Stefanie Weisman

I suppose ever since I was about 14, I remember listening to "Sgt. Pepper's," and I remember thinking, "how do you possibly write songs like that?" I remember starting to try and write songs around that age, but just sitting around with an acoustic guitar, and try to come up with ideas for songs, and that's just what I've done ever since. I just never really stopped doing that, I suppose. — Colin Hay

But the truth is that I don't want to simply offer others a fleeting moment of "inspiration." I want my story to spark real change. An aha moment becomes most meaningful when it leads us to do more. Dream bigger. Move past our so-called limitations. Defy expectations. Bounce back with the resilience that every single one of us was born with. I didn't write this book because I want you to say, "Wow, look at what that girl overcame - good for her." I'm sharing my story because I want you to see what's possible in your own life. Right here. Right now. Starting the second you pick up your pen and create your own amazing narrative. The words of the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu have always resonated with me: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." What follows is my first step. My first stumble. My first dance. My first dream. — Amy Purdy

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius", or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius", am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. — Robert Graves

As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write. — Glen Duncan

Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer. — Len Deighton

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story. — Jeff Lemire

I've always wanted to be a part of that experience of writing to an audience that is just starting to fall in love with books. When I felt that my writing for adults had become cemented, I decided to write a YA series. — Sarah Mlynowski

I was really inspired while I was pregnant and I wrote a whole album for my baby. I wanted to write a kids album that didn't annoy parents. I used The Beatles 'Rocky Raccoon' as sort of a starting place for my writing. — Jewel

It was like starting to write a novel. When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing. So — John Steinbeck

Writing is harder than anything else; at least starting to write is. — Kristin Hunter

The way Smith sees it, this kind of approach denotes a certain category of writer: the Micro Manager. Authors fall into one of two primary camps, she explained in her 2009 book of essays, Changing My Mind.691 Macro Planners work out the structure of their novels and then write within that structure. Micro Managers, on the other hand, don't rely on an overarching configuration (don't even conceive of one), but rather home in on each sentence, one by one, and each sentence, as they come to it, becomes the only thing that exists. If there is a spectrum starting with Macro Planners on one end and Micro Managers on the other, Smith would be somewhere to the right of the page. Smith's writing is entirely incremental and cumulative. The grand plan is that there is no grand plan; working things out ahead of time ruins everything, "feels disastrous."She prefers the writing of a novel as a process of discovery. "The thinking goes on on the page," not beforehand. — Sarah Stodola

The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked ... that's the moment you may be starting to get it right. — Neil Gaiman

I do have trouble starting books. I have ideas that I have trouble starting to write. But I'm the kind of person who tends to finish everything she starts out of sheer stubbornness. — Cynthia Voigt

You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to write, so let's write. We'll chat later. Get out your pen and paper or fire up the computer. Pour yourself a coffee. Unplug the phone. Once you start, you can't stop. Give yourself a half hour. Relax. Don't think too much. You're starting a journey, and you don't know where you're going. But you do know you're going someplace you haven't been before. — John Dufresne

That last page turned is a perfect excuse to write a whole new book. — Toni Sorenson

When a story or part of a story comes to me, I turn it over in my mind a long time before starting to write. I might make notes or take long drives or who knows what. By the time I give myself permission to write, I know certain things, though not everything. I know where the story is headed, and I know certain crucial points along the way. — Steven Millhauser

When I write my scripts, there's a point at which if I'm not starting to see them visually, I feel like I'm kind of cheating. So my scripts are laden with a lot of visual description, which makes them not so much fun to read - I kind of weigh them down. — Todd Haynes

I'm really interested in starting to write my own songs. I never really did, but hopefully I will because I'm so interested in writing my own songs. — Danielle Bradbery

I'd gotten the message in my home, starting with my grandfather, that real work, the kind that makes you sweat and gets your hands dirty, is a respectable, necessary thing. But I wanted to write - and writing didn't qualify. Whenever I told my parents I dreamed of becoming a writer, they said, 'Great, but what are you going to do for work?' — Ali Liebegott

Too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowning. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. — Rebecca Solnit

You know you're ready to write a book when you have a feeling that you should do it, no matter what anybody says. It's like falling in love or starting a company. When you're still wondering if you should get married or you're still wondering whether you should start a company that might be not the right person or the right idea. And writing is the same way. When you've locked on to the topic, you'll just write it. — Guy Kawasaki

When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it. — Wallace Shawn

I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am. — Andrew Motion

I'm under strict instructions to write a happy ending. Rule number ninety-seven: You're not allowed to make a dragon cry."
"Right," Said Sophie, starting the engine. "Tears might quench their fire. — Chris D'Lacey

I was writing the kind of comic that would make me, at age 26 or 27, go down to a comic book store every month and spend my $2. That was my starting point. I wanted to write a comic that I would read. And that's still my agenda. — Neil Gaiman

How often do you think we write our own ending before the story is even finished? How often do we give up on ourselves when our lives are just starting? Things get hard and we immediately back away and assume that means we're going in the wrong direction, doing the wrong thing. If anything, when the waters get thick, that's our sign to keep going. — Rachel Van Dyken

Ever since I began to compose, I have remained true to my starting principle: not to write a page because no matter what public, or what pretty girl wanted it to be thus or thus; but to write solely as I myself thought best, and as it gave me pleasure. — Felix Mendelssohn

I think I see my life already starting to write on my next decision the adventures of a loneliness which for the first time in years can stand being alone again. — Angelos Michalopoulos

Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion. — Barbara Kingsolver

I love research so much that I do an enormous amount; it helps put off the moment of starting to write the story. — Alan Garner

The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. — Flannery O'Connor

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories. — Elmore Leonard

Here's what I didn't know when I was starting out that I now know ... I thought when you were starting out it was really hard to write because you hadn't broken in yet, you hadn't really hit your stride yet. What I found out paradoxically is that the next script you write doesn't get easier because you wrote one before ... each one gets harder by a factor of 10. — Shane Black

I used to write songs that were deeply personal, but since I am becoming so passionate about the world around me, that passion and drive is starting to come into my work. — Sophie B. Hawkins

Different ideas will capture my imagination and ask if they can be in a story. Sometimes they fit together and sometimes they don't. One notion leads to another and I might write pages that will have to go away later, but I'm sketching, getting to know a character, how he or she speaks or lives, so I just let it flow. Things start to click. I don't outline before starting, nor do I write one chapter at a time or even in chronological order. If I'm thinking about a scene, conversation, or event that will come later, I page down and write away. — Lisa Preston

I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing. — Tom Drury

My blackness is spreading, Alice. I've been seeing and hearing things that can't be there or anywhere. At night, when I'm not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I'll have to give this thing up and write a novel. — Hanif Kureishi

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that you knew or had seen or had heard someone say. — Ernest Hemingway,

My hands were starting to shake a little. Because I hadn't known that I knew these things. Just having a notebook to write them in, and having someone to write them to, made them all rise to the surface. — Rachel Cohn

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now. — Ernest Hemingway,