Bestselling authors often give great writing quotes—not just for inspiration but for improving your craft. Great writers have found their way with prose. So, their advice is often a great place to start discovering your own way of writing.
From advice on plotting to praise of reading, writing quotes can teach a lot of things about crafting good stories. They have tips you may never have thought of or found in a creative writing textbook. I thought I’d share with you a few great quotes I’ve found with clever writing advice.
“Never sit staring at a blank page or screen. If you find yourself stuck, write. Write about the scene you’re trying to write. Writing about is easier than writing, and chances are, it will give you your way in.”
-Laini Taylor
I think this quote really speaks for itself. If you’re ever in a writing bind, try creating a description, an outline, or any thoughts you have at all about the thing you want to write. That can easily evolve from a description to a full-fledged part of your story.
“Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.”
Good plots center around people—around human conflict. That’s not to say spaceship crashes, monster-hunting, or spectacular crimes don’t make good stories—but at the heart of these things are still strong human characters living amazing stories. The plots are not the events of these stories, but the conflict between characters. The human’s (and humanized alien’s) reactions to the spaceship crash, the rivalry between two famous monster-hunters, or the relationship between criminal and detective—these things make the real plot.
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
-William Faulkner
Read. This is the advice you see thrown everywhere—right, left, up, down, forwards, backwards, in books, on TV, and in lists of writing quotes—everywhere. You might even be tired of hearing it.
But it is true. Reading helps develop a writer’s senses, and as Faulkner notes, judgment. Prolific readers make discerning writers.
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
-Stephen King, On Writing
Would a list be complete without a quote from On Writing? I doubt it. Description is so important for creating a vivid, believable story. This doesn’t mean you should go overboard, describing every little detail.
Good description means crafting careful, evocative descriptions. It means allowing flexibility. It means giving all sorts hints to the reader about what the scenes look like, but letting the reader guess. Readers can flesh out the words and hints into a full mental image.
Craft suggestive descriptive passages, and let the reader imagine fill in the suggestion with their own mind.
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
I think it’s really important for good stories to confront important ideas. It also makes a story way more authentic when an author has a personal connection to those ideas.
Look at the conflicts and problems in your own life, and no matter how distant they may seem, try infusing them into your narrative. You’ll see a depth form in your writing.
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to send it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”
I like this idea because it tells a writer to go with their instincts. Trust your writing gut!
Sometimes, you need to drop careful plotting and go with the version your heart thinks is best. You can edit, chop, and splice scenes around later. Put your best ideas into your writing, here and now.
“True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.”
This quote is so crucial to thinking about characters. Remember how different you act under stress or in an emergency. I act totally different under duress—we all do!
But fiction characters are people we usually see on the worst day in their life. Characters almost always under duress. We usually see characters responding to worst-case scenarios involving war, crime, loss, or death.
So remember as you write, especially when you write characters who are pulled into a disaster, how people behave under stress. Think about how you have two versions of a character, an everyday ordinary character and a disaster-day extraordinary character, and how those two versions make different choices. We all do, and so should your character.
“Ten Steps to Becoming a Better Writer.
1. Write.
2. Write more.
3. Write even more.
4. Write even more than that.
5. Write when you don’t want to.
6. Write when you do.
7. Write when you have something to say.
8. Write when you don’t.
9. Write every day.
10. Keep writing.”
Ummm, yes. I can say with experience from trying both writing and not-writing, that writing is the best way to become a good writer. Not-writing makes it very hard to become a good writer.
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“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do—to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies across the street.”
-Stephen King
The story is more important than the way you tell it—at least according to Stephen King. And a good story must be true to life, even when life is difficult or hard to accept. Find a kernel of truth, even if it’s controversial, and you have the start of a good story.
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
-Mark Twain
I love a good adverb, but “very” isn’t one of them. It’s just not a very good word. Using more powerful language will make your writing very good exceptional.
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
-Anton Chekhov
And now we get to show vs. tell. There’s a time for showing and a time for telling, but it’s easy to confuse the two. Description should always focus on powerful displays of showing. Focus on close and beautiful details. And as King notes, let the reader fill in the gaps—they’ll figure out where the light is coming from as the story goes on.
So there are a few nuggets of wisdom from famous writers to help you on your way. I hope these writing quotes have gotten you thinking. Time to get reading, writing, and having a great day, my fellow writers!
Mint is a writer and digital marketing pro who lives in coastal Virginia with her family and one lovable pitbull. Her passions include helping people and businesses display their best side through the power of communication, buying her dog costumes he doesn’t want to wear, and talking all day about Batman.
This was SO helpful! I’m not personally writing a book but you can even apply most (if not all) the advice here to blog posts!
Thank you, I will be saving this for future reference!
So glad to be helpful! And yes, I find a lot of the same writing and storytelling advice you find in fiction can also be applied to blog writing.