On words and books and writing.
Steampunk and sci-fi.
Romance and action.
Fantasy and mystery.
Adults, but we promise to keep it SFW.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.
Neil Gaiman (via fierycross)
(Source: coltaines-march)
You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
Margaret Atwood (via writingquotes)
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams (via writingquotes)
Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader’s desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That’s called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax.
Colin Greenland (via amandaonwriting)
Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft. You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
Stephen King (via alexisawkward)
That’s great and true advice!
(via michaelmidnight)
(Source: amandaonwriting)
I’m impossibly tall. When they find it hard to pair you up with the opposite sex, then what’s left for a woman? Either you’re the ball-buster or the not-so-attractive girlfriend standing by the lead. I mean, traditionally not so attractive. … When you fall within the cracks, you thank God for sci-fi, because they’ll give you a gun, and they’ll say, ‘Go over there and conquer that world. You kick some ass, girl!
Gina Torres (on working on Firefly)
(Source: hobbitshuntersandheroes)
Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
Ursula K. LeGuin (via amandaonwriting)
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula Le Guin (via amandaonwriting)
Stories are a different kind of true.
Emma Donoghue (via writingquotes)
