Because every
story begins
with words

Eight secrets to writing a low-budget movie

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Eight secrets to writing a low-budget movie.

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

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote

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

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

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

Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Roddy Doyle

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.

Robert McKee

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

Stephen King

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

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

William Goldman

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

Thomas Wolfe

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

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

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

Romulus Linney

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein