inspiration, creative writing prompts, motivational quotes, poetry and gentle nagging on the creative writing life…
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.Jane Yolen One of my Continue reading Writing as exercise
Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.P. G. Wodehouse What heights have you climbed to Continue reading Success
The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.–Eudora Welty As writers we all have our own unique voice, but many writers struggle with their voice and try to write like someone else without appreciating their individuality. Continue reading Language
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.Orson Scott Card Working in a cafe gives me a lot of daily customer Continue reading Story Ideas
If you don’t allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, it would be hard to write something very good.Steven Galloway One of my decluttering tasks last week involved throwing out/shredding some of my old writing notebooks. Some Continue reading Cleaning out the old to make room for the new
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.Willa Cather When I was thirteen I told my father I wanted to be a writer and he told me I needed to go out Continue reading Writing Material
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.Robert Graves A good friend of mine told me she doesn’t know why I try so hard to write poetry and short stories because there’s no money in Continue reading Paying the bills
“As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint.” Joan Aiken I grow sweet peas every year, mostly because my mother-in-law loves them and I have grown to Continue reading Sweet Peas
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer… Stephen Leigh The first question that I posed to the I Ching in The I Ching for Continue reading Take a Break
Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that Continue reading Why?