Writing Apprenticeship Quotes

My first published novel, 'American Rust,' took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

As a younger man I wrote for eight years without ever earning a nickel which is a long apprenticeship, but in that time I learned a lot about my trade.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.

If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.

I was so fortunate to get the opportunity to be a writers' apprentice on A Different World. It was my favorite show. So to go from watching Dwayne and Whitley to writing for Dwayne and Whitley was incredible.

As a young writer, I learned a lot about grammatical structure from reading plays, from performing the plays. I think that was a wonderful apprenticeship.

Of course some people manage to write books really young and publish really young. But for most writers, it takes several years because you have to apprentice yourself to the craft, and you also have to grow up. I think maturity is connected to one's ability to write well.