Ten Tips from Best Selling Authors

If you follow this blog, you’re a book lover. A reader. A writer. Possibly both. Here’s a peek into the mind of some famous writers. Enjoy!

Maya Angelou – “What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks, the most boring and awful stuff. And then, it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’”

James Patterson – “I pretend I’m sitting across from somebody, telling them a story and I don’t want the to get up.”

Kurt Vonnegut – “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they’re made of.

Elmore Leonard – “Never use a verb other than said to carry dialogue. The dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. Said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied.”

Isobel Allende – “Writing is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You never know if it will reach any shores.”

Stephen King – “Read a lot and write a lot. If you don’t read, you can’t be a writer.”

Ernest Hemmingway – “Each day’s work should only be interrupted when one knows where to begin again the next day.”

Annie Dillard – “A work in progress quickly becomes feral. You must visit it every day to reassert your mastery over it.”

Margaret Atwood – “If I waited for perfection, I’d never write a word.”

Mary Heaton Vorse – “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”