The Writing Process Quotes

“Don't write about Man; write about a man.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that wont the game.”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“Each time I discovered a potential link between one character’s story and another’s, several more connections would reveal themselves, like a beautiful, complex web spinning itself.”
― Richard Scarsbrook, Rockets Versus Gravity

“Interview 2019: Here's a deep dark secret that I'm going to share with you: Everybody who goes on about their writing process is probably just making it up, because you can't actually remember that much about how you wrote things. Unless you're a much better organized person than I am. (My process) is skiing down a hill. When you are skiing down a hill, you're trying not to fall over --- and you're making a lot of unconscious decisions automatically. You're not thinking about them because if you do, you will fall over.”
― Margaret Atwood, Margaret Atwood: Conversations

“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.”
― Roman Payne

“For the next fortnight Anne writhed or reveled, according to the mood, in her literary pursuits. Now she would be jubilant over a brilliant idea, now despairing because some contrary character would not behave properly. Diana could not understand this.
'Make them do as you want them to,' she said.
'I can't,' mourned Anne. 'Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best.”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction