The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019July 21, 2023 1366

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn’t aware of their neologism contest, but I am now! Read and enjoy. Pass it along.

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

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

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

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

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.

E. L. Doctorow

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

Truman Capote

A writer is a world trapped in a person.