Peter V. Brett Quotes

I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.

I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.

Discipline is what makes a writer. If writing was like lifting weights, then I'd look like Mr. Universe. Write every day. Give the Muse a chance to get to know you.

There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.

It's a job. When I'm writing I'm going to do it five to six days a week and I'm going to work for four to six hours a day. There's no magic writing fairy. It's just hard work.

If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea.

I am always urging my students to honor their writing practice, to set up a schedule.

Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed.

I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing.

It's the hardest thing in the world to dedicate to writing, but if you do that even once a week, after six months or a year you'll have something substantial.

My boyfriend suggested I write two pages a day. He wouldn't take me out if I hadn't done my two pages. That's how I wrote my second novel.

People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.

Capote wrote every day. He said that's the only way, you have to sit down every day and do it.

I set myself 600 words a day as a minimum output, regardless of the weather, my state of mind or if I'm sick or well. There must be 600 finished words-not almost right words.

At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.

I am always writing; if you want to survive in this business, you need to keep working, keep creating and never stop the output.

My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.

When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have to do.

I'm a person who, when I set out to write, I write. It's just like when you set out to eat, you eat, or when you set out to sleep, you sleep. I don't do somersaults to write something. I just do it.

I make sure to write every day, even if it's a little bit.

One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.

I guess I write four or five hours a day, but I do it seven days a week. It's very disciplined, yes, but it's joy for me.

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

I write every day. Most weekdays, I write about ten hours a day. That doesn't mean eight hours of surfing the Net or watching videos on YouTube. I park my butt in a chair and write... I learned that writer's block is a myth created by people who don't have, or understand, a writing process.