Lauren Mayberry Quotes

If you want to be a writer, don't worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.

I think the only way you can become a writer is through honing your voice, creating your own voice.

Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

I think striking the right tone for your story is, if you like, the alchemical work of writing.

Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

I love writing prose. I really love writing prose. It's very pleasurable for me.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

I just have to be able to follow and enjoy the writer's voice and the writer's point of view. Liking what the person has to say is not really important to me.

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

I think tone gives birth to the story.

Finding one's voice - or creating a narrative voice that has the power to carry your story - is the hardest part.

After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.

For heaven's sake, don't write writing. Write reading!

When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.