Because every
story begins
with words

video ex-military writers for your novel, memoir or screenplay

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Ex-military writers for your novel, memoir or screenplay.

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.

Quentin Tarantino

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

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.

William C. Gault

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.

J.K. Rowling

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

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

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

Joseph Conrad

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

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.

John Irving

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

William Shawn

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Roald Dahl

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

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

Michael Burke