'The Miraculousness of the Ordinary'

20 pieces of famous writing advice

For some while, I’ve been keeping micro-snippets of advice from famous authors in a notebook. I’m not sure why. I might have started doing so for inspiration, or for reassurance that the greats also struggle from time to time, but more likely it was because I knew that summarising the craft of writing into a pithy quote - reducing to a mere soundbite something that takes ten thousand hours to become vaguely competent at, and a lifetime to never quite perfect - is so bonkers it’s surely worth the challenge. Anyway, here are twenty quotes on writing I consider to be the finest:

Cut: only by having no inessential words can every essential word be made to count.

Diana Athill

Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road.

Margaret Atwood

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.

Ray Bradbury

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Anton Chekov

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

Anne Enright

Don’t have children.

Richard Ford

Don’t wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.

Esther Freud

Sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

Neil Gaiman

Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

David Hare

Writing doesn't love. It doesn’t care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, and pass it on.

Al Kennedy

Sometimes you have to go on writing when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing to do is shovel shit from a sitting position.

Stephen King

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. And if you don’t get it, you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

Jack London

Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else?

Hilary Mantel

Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary.

Andrew Motion

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Joyce Carol Oates

You can fix anything but a blank page.

Nora Roberts

If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.

Colm Toibin

Never begin the book when you feel you want to begin it, but hold off a while longer.

Rose Tremain

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Kurt Vonnegut

Don’t hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer, it will be just as bad when it comes out.

Jeanette Winterson