Writer's Growth Quotes

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.

Genre-spanning is the effort to make the live show interesting. It's also a great way to challenge yourself as a writer.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.

You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

I caution writers all the time to slow down and pay more attention to the work in front of them than to the end result. I don't think you write one book and get anywhere. I think you write five books and then maybe you are finally on the right path.

Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one's first productions.

I believe that a writer learns from every story he writes, and when you try different things, you learn different lessons. Working with other writers, as in Hollywood or in a shared world series, will also strengthen your skills, by exposing you to new ways of seeing the work, and different approaches to certain creative challenges.

If there's any single talent a writer needs, it's persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.

I think I'm always changing as a writer and trying new things.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.

I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.

I've been writing stories since I was 12. 'Writer's Digest' was one of my writing teachers, actually.

I think I began to like writing a lot more, and to be a better writer, when I did it for a while alone. It made me a little more confident about my style.

I think what I like best is that when people give talks or workshops, it doesn't really matter what level you are as a writer - whether you are a beginner, or you've been around the block a bit; there's something that you can take away from every session.

My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him. I had some sort of gift and when it came time to try to find a publisher I had a little bit of an "in" because I had his agent I could turn to, to at least read my initial offerings when I was about 20. But the only problem was that they were just awful, they were just terrible stories and my agent, who ended up being my agent, was very, very sweet about it, but it took about four years until I actually had something worth trying to sell.

My main strength as a young writer was that I had no fear of making mistakes. I knew I would and I knew I could and would learn from them.

During my last year of college I wrote the same ten pages over and over again. Those ten pages became the first few pages of my first novel. I can still recite the opening paragraph from memory - only now I cringe when I do it because they are - surprise! - a classic example of overwriting, in addition to being a more than a little pretentious.

I want to have new challenges and write new crazy books because I think it makes me a better writer to be insecure and try new things.

You grow a whole lot more as a writer by getting old stories out of the house and letting new ones come in and live with you until they grow up and are ready to go. Don't let the old ones stay there and grow fat and cranky and eat all the food out of the refrigerator. You have dozens of generations of stories inside you, but the only way to make room for the new ones is to write the old ones and mail them off.

You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.

I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.