This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.
Terry BrooksRead
The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.
Interpretation
Inspiration is unpredictable and cannot be summoned at will.
This quote emphasizes the unpredictable nature of creativity, likening it to a muse that offers inspiration only when it chooses. It reflects the understanding that artistic inspiration can be fleeting, and one must be ready to embrace it when it arrives, as it may not return on command.
In practice
This quote could be shared during an artist's workshop to encourage participants to embrace spontaneous inspiration.
This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.
I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.
After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.
If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.
Fiction writing is a twenty-four-hou r-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don't take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.
Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
It was never about having a Mohican haircut or wearing a ripped T-shirt. It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that.
At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.
Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.
No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.
Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.
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