Ben Nicholson Quotes

Get your butt in a chair and write. If it comes out weak or bad or clunky or ordinary, then accept that this happens to everyone. Everyone. Get it down, get it done, and fix it in the rewrite. Just like everyone from Stephen King to J. K. Rowling to Chuck Palahniuk does.

Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.

Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book.

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.

I must have done everything I had. You go through years where you go through everything you've ever written.

'Purple Plumeria' I dithered over for months and then wrote the whole thing between the beginning of July and end of August. The dithering and procrastination time was three times the writing times.

I've been known to write 10 pages a day for 10 days running before I take a breath. I am not a disciplined writer. I'm one of those people who laughingly call themselves inspirational writers, which basically means someone who has no control over their own creative process.

You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.

I don't write a novel every two years.

I can't write every day. I have to skip a day in between. If I try to do it every day, nothing comes.

If you are stymied as a writer, if it's just not coming together, then take the pressure off and don't feel that you need to write 1,000 words today; just write one really good sentence.

I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.

I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.

It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it's the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success.

I haven't got a writer's discipline.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

I always thought writer's block was something that prats used as an easy excuse for not doing any work.

I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn't respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.

I go in and out of season. I won't write for months, and then all of a sudden, I'll write like I've got a fever.

When I made the decision to really get serious about my writing, I set myself a goal of 1,000 words a day for seven days. If I got to 7,000 words before Monday I could take a day off, but I had to get there. I had to do that every week.