Mary Pilon Quotes

Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.

Writing is the hardest physical work there is.

I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

Generally, I find that when you're writing and having fun with the writing, that energy and dynamism is going to come out in the text one way or another.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.

I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.

One of the easiest things in the world is not to write... If it were easy, everyone would do it.

A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

I always work from outline and almost always write out of sequence. It just works for me.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.

If you want anybody to have a different voice, you really have to visualize and hear the voices of all these people. Sometimes when I write with specific actors in mind, it helps.

I start my process hand written, and then I dump it in. It's like you're getting a second draft 'cause when I put it in the computer, I fix it and change stuff. That's my process. I picked that up from speaking to Neil Gaiman and Joe Hill. I was messing around with the idea of starting to write more, writing a book and doing things like this, and I reached out for advice. They were like, "Oh, we hand write, and then we dump it all in." I was like, "Great! There's no more blank pages."

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, "I need a little more psychological realism."

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.