Can you use a good laugh? David Thorne is an Australian writer, humorist and satirist. I think he’s a really funny guy. Read More...
I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
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.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
























