Melisende

“The first piece of advice I would give any writer is to read a lot and to read widely. Firstly you start to realize what’s out there and what isn’t out there. Publishers are looking for stories that haven’t been told before. Reading other people can also improve your own writing. I love reading poetry even though I wouldn’t think of writing it. A great poet can say in two lines what it takes me a whole novel to express. If I’ve learned from any kind of writing, it’s poetry – and the lesson is concision. What can you leave out and the reader will still get the message?”
― ian Rankin

“... history is a fog, a fog of uncertainty. The deeper one peers into it, the murkier and more uncertain the fog becomes. The instant an event has transpired and begins receding into the past it becomes vulnerable to memory and interpretation..”
― Don Hollway, The Last Viking: The True Story of King Harald Hardrada and the End of the Norsemen

“Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. . . . The reader is, in fact, the writer’s only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. . . . It is, of course, the writer’s job to reach out and grab this reader: If he is a reader who cannot endure a love story, it is the writer’s job, no more and no less, to make him read a love story and like it. Using any device that might possibly work, the writer has to snare the reader’s attention and keep it.”
― Shirley Jackson

“.... if we cite other scholars without critical thinking, or without wondering why and in what context something was written, we risk perpetuating ideas that we may, in fact, not know to be correct ...”
― Christian Raffensperger, The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom