Rob Bignell's Blog

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Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.

Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.

Paper has more patience than people.

The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings; otherwise, I'd absolutely suffocate.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Words may show a man's wit but actions his meaning.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. 

We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

,,, a writer���s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.

I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.

This is a writer���s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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If I talk about writing, I can���t do any writing for some time afterward. I���m too self-conscious.

Everything I write is about trying to lead a life other than my own.

Why didn���t I write about somebody who went off to climb Everest? I don���t know, but that doesn���t interest me much.

Sometimes it���s plodding, sometimes it flows.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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Stories aren���t made of language: they���re made of something else... perhaps they���re made of life.

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter���s fear of the blank canvas ��� the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.

After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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Writing is storytelling. No matter how you slice it, you're saying, 'Once upon a time.' That's what writing is all about.

A common question asked of writers is "When did you decide to become a writer?" The answer, of course, is that we didn't decide anything. It was decided for us. I firmly believe that mythical godmothers make appearances at our cradles, and bestow their gifts. The godmother who might have blessed me with a singing voice did not show up; the goddess of dance was nowhere in sight; the chef-to-the-angels was otherwise engaged. Only one made the journey to my cradle, and she whispered, "You will be a storyteller."

As a writer, you paint strokes and leave suggestions so readers can create their own pictures. That allows you to know someone by a small action and it saves countless pages of explanation.

When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.

A library is a path to the future ��� find yours there.

Approach your lives as if they were novels, with their own heroes, villains, red herrings, and triumphs.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

In writing are the roots, in writing are the foundations of eloquence; by writing resources are stored up, as it were, in a sacred repository, when they may be drawn forth for sudden emergencies, or as circumstances require.

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

Erasure is as important as writing. Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute���

We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.

 The best method of correction is to put aside for a time what we have written, so that when we come to it again it may have an aspect of novelty, as of being another man's work; in this way we may preserve ourselves from regarding our writings with the affection that we lavish upon a newborn child.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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You can't be blocked if you just keep on writing words. Any words. People who get 'blocked' make the mistake of thinking they have to write good words.

Writing is an antisocial act.

Writers just kept on staring at nothing until they wrote something. Might be two minutes or two weeks.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!