Writing Bones

Writing tips, tricks, quotes, prompts, and more. Feel free to ask or request something!

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You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

Octavia E. Butler

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People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be.

Delphine de Vigan

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The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Terry Pratchett

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It’s not: I jumped in, and it was cold. No. It was cold, and I jumped in. Always arrange a sentence so you appear to be fearless, when in fact you are far less than fearless—you are clueless.

Jarod Kintz

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Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

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Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.

Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

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I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.

Gilda Radner

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One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Carl Sagan

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Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.

Stephen King

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Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.

Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

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If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.

Terry Pratchett

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A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

William Styron

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Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

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Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

Julio Cortázar

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Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

Toni Morrison

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As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

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We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book