27 Writing Quotes, 1 for Every Occaision (ish)

A quick and dirty list of some of my favourite writing quotes for you to use in any article, post, diatribe, speech, dedication, mantra or bellow to the heavens. Hope you enjoy and feel free to add your own in the comments!

Ambition
1. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C.S. Lewis

The Aging Writer
2. With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
James Thurber

3. If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis

4. I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.
Jeffrey Bernard.

Research
5. Get the facts first. You can distort them later.
Mark Twain

Honing
6. The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain

7. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. Ray Bradbury

8. Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller quotes

Deadlines
9. I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
Douglas Adams

10. Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
Paul Theroux

Procrastination
11. For a moment, nothing happened.Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
Douglas Adams

12. The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.
Agatha Christie

13. Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance
Dan Greenburg

Getting It Right
14. A good novel tells us the truth about it’s hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

15. The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
Richard Harding Davis

16. The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy

The Truth about Writing
17. A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
William Faulkner

18. Let’s face it, writing is hell.
William Styron

20. For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Ernest Hemingway

21. I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries

22. The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly quotes

Criticism
23. This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker

Getting Paid
24. The free-lance writer is the person who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Robert Benchley

25. The large print giveth, but the small print taketh away.
Tom Waits

Companions
26. A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.
Barbara Holland

27. A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
P. L. Travers

The Flow!

OK, that’s enough putting it off, we have to sit down and get on with it.

However, now that I have explored what it is to have ambition, be inspired and then become a procrastinator, where do we go?

Where can we go?

Productivity isn’t something that you switch on and off as a writer, you have to achieve the zen like state of ‘Flow’. We’ve all experienced it, that feeling that you may never finish typing because the words aren’t just flowing out of you they are somehow jumping out before you barely think of them. It’s that glorious feeling that you are blissfully slightly out of control but, like a poker winning streak, you shouldn’t mess with it, you should just go with it. Officially, Flow is the operative mental state in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing with an energised focus, complete involvement and feeling of complete success in the process of the activity. It was discovered by a guy defined Csíkszentmihályi and he identified  nine factors that accompanies the experience of flow:

1. Clear goals – clear attainable goals allow our crazy, wild expectations to become tangible, something to aspire to. The smaller the goals within a wider context, the easier it will be to view progress against your big dream.
2. Concentration – see my previous posts about distractions! It’s not hard to be 100% focused but there are steps to take to be able to maintain concentration to be able to slip in your creative trance.
3. According to our massively monickered friend, within the feeling of flow a loss of self-consciousness leads to the feeling of the merging of action and awareness. Think of it like being the Bruce Lee of writing and waving your fingers at the empty screen before writing.
4. You may experience a distorted sense of time like when you sit down, effectively black out and come around to see a couple of thousand words and a empty wine glass. Or bottle, but that would perhaps explain the black-out.
5. After briefly flicking through your newly filled pages, you will find that it’s mostly good stuff. The total immersion you experience you to connect to the words that you’re writing and allow it to bring out your best.
6. You will also surprise yourself by writing some of your best stuff. Stuff that you probably didn’t even realise that was in you. It may start to sound like some sort of religious experience and I suppose it is if you worship words!
7. Although a great deal of the process of this feeling may feel like you are out of control, you are actually very much so. It is all within you in the first place, this is just a method of controlling your output. Like putting your volume up to 11.
8. The actual feeling of performing the act of creating is intrinsically rewarding, so the flow become self fulfilling like a your own solar panel. The more you work, the more you want.
9. Once you have become become absorbed in your activity, and your focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, there is an action awareness merging that effectively turns you into a writing superhero. I suggest you have a superhero word such as, “Flame On” to really get the full effect.

So there you have it, that is ‘The Flow’, my take on a serious, psychological topic with my own little twist on it. So, get to it; “FLAME ON”!

PS Sorry I haven’t posted recently, I’ve been a bit ill, better now though!

Procrastination

Right, we are now inspired to produce scribblings of the finest prose so we must get to the keyboard and begin. We’ve finished the school run and kissed our partners farewell until the evening so we have the rest of follow our inspiration wherever they may lead us. The day lies before us like a glorious canvas and we have many vivid colours to spray around like Jackson Pollock on a particularly inspired day. Let’s get going!

0910 – Well, whilst I make for the computer to boot we may as well open the post whilst I wait for the coffee to brew. Oo look, we may have won some sort of lottery, all we have to do is send back these three envelopes and we have a 1 in 3 chance of winning something. What could it be I wonder?

0930 – Well, I’ve made the coffee and have got the envelopes ready to post, let’s get to it! Hey, wait a moment, that Lottery could be scam, I’d better check the internet to see if it’s been reported….it seems to be fine but there are a lot unscrupulous people out there, maybe I should do a story on that to warn people what’s out there. Where’s my notebook? I should write that down.

0945 – Right, that another idea captured for later, excellent, I have a production line all set up now. All I need now is to get some words down. DING. Oh, some emails, what’s this? I’ve won the Nigerian Lottery again. Twice. Great, I can retire. I wonder who actually falls for these things? Anyone? Maybe google knows. Oh yes, it seems like quite a few people have fallen for it, maybe it’s a good story, I should write this down. Good, another story captured. And what’s that? Extend my what?! No thank you where much. DELETE.

1030 – Well, the notebook is filling up quite nicely and it looks like the sun is coming out. Magnificent! What a great day to be creating. Hey, you know what, I bet it would be great to sit outside and write. Yes, let’s do that.

1130 – Hmm, I wonder why my wireless doesn’t reach out there, it’s a shame as it works right up to near the garden table and then cuts out. I must remember to look into that. Back to the indoor desk for me then. Still, looking out of the window the day does look magnificent. Look, there’s a squirrel running around with half an apple in it’s mouth, where’s my camera. I am going to have to put this up on my blog.

1200 – I really need to redesign my blog, it looks OK but it doesn’t really bring across my true commitment to writing. Let’s have a quick fiddle with it.

1230 – Wordpress can be really awkward sometimes, how do you create a page with a separate RSS feed for my published articles? OH MY GOD, the squirrel is back and what does he have this time? Is that a Twinkie? The squirrel has a full Twinkie in it’s mouth! Where did it get that? WHERE IS MY CAMERA?

1300 – Seeing that squirrel eating a Twinkie has made me hungry. I do worry about squirrel nutrition habits now but I suppose it had an apple before the Twinkie so maybe it’s a balanced diet. OK, time for lunch.

1430 – Delicious lunch now digesting and dinner baking away for the kids, we are domestic Gods and Goddesses! What, what’s that smell? Did I put the oven on the correct temperature? Let me go check.

1445 – All fine, it was just a little spillage on the oven base. It always wafts the smell through the house when that happens because of the fan assistance technology. So the brochure tells me. SO THEN, to writing! Where was I? Wait, I’ve only written 20 words? How can that be I’ve been working at this all day! Oh, someone’s at the door?

1530 – Two guys made out they were looking for Jesus and wanted to know if I had found him. I hadn’t. Turns out they actually had and wanted tell me all about him and I felt too rude to tell them ‘no thanks’. I have a pamphlet showing me how to find Jesus now, should I ever feel that I lost him or need to demonstrate to further callers that I have at least the method rather than the compulsion.

1540 – Wow, is that the time? I need to go pick up the kids and drop them off at soccer practise and swimming coaching. Then chess club and ballet. Or is it science club and a sleep-over tonight? Actually, I think it’s a science club sleep-over as they have to hand in their projects by tomorrow. They’re all staying at the Johnson’s as they have a huge garage to work in for their experiments. Right, where’s my keys, let’s get going.

1545 – I really could go for a Twinkie right now, where did that come from?

What Are Your Ambitions?

Can you remember the point in your life when you thought, “I want to make a living from writing”?

Whether it be paid blogger, an article writer, a journalist, a novelist or screenplay writer; was there an actual clear as a bell lightning strike from the creative heavens?

It’s difficult not romanticise yourself gently placing down your finished copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ and staring off toward the setting sun, breathing the words, “I hear your words Mr Fitzgerald and I answer your call. I will take up your mantle and write the next great American novel.”

When your realisations set in, what were your original ambitions? A best selling novel? A blog followed by tens of thousands? A syndicated column in the New York Times? Money? Personally, when I realised I wanted to make a living from writing I envisaged myself, within a matter of months, regaling the New York literati with heady tales of teenage life in South Wales. I actually imagined myself chatting with the author of Catch 22, “Oh yes, Joseph Heller, you could say that times were moving fast and urgent decisions were to be made. The lure of literature was too strong, I had to succumb to my muse. I didn’t write this book/article/blog post, it demanded to be channelled.”

The reality, unfortunately, is probably a lot more mundane. You’d probably just finished an average novel with a poor, rushed ending whilst on your third glass of wine and tossed the tome casually to one side cursing the time you had wasted on it. Or maybe you went slightly crazy over the grammatical errors in a three thousand circulation free ad newspaper. You maybe considered sending a four page letter cataloguing the myriad apostrophe catastrophes throughout the rag then shouted to the heavens, “GOOD GOD! I could do so much better than that. You know what, I am going to start a blog, TONIGHT.”

Of course, now the ambition touch paper had been lit and you now have the obsessive compulsion to began scribbling down your observations and thoughts on every scribeable surface and then storing them in the least obvious places imaginable. For example, you wake up on an idle Tuesday and decide to post a blog entry. But wait, where are those dialog sections I transcribed from memory in the toilet of a Gas Station? Oh yes, I wrote it in nail varnish on a napkin and put in my sock. And where are the notes from my chance meeting with Robert Downey Junior in a hot air balloon over the Serengheti? Oh yes, they’re in my impossibly complicated filing system that consists of a twenty seven shoe boxes at the bottom of my spare bedroom closet cross referenced by importance, saleability, cleverness, funniness and neatness of handwriting. Oh, and if you can’t find that one five line note that completes the masterpiece of your third personal blog post, your YouTube comments would become especially vitriolic that day.

My own journey was a lot more simple. I was a pretentious teenager for all the wrong reasons. I had read a little Voltaire, a lot of Twain, loads of Shakespeare, a pinch of Heller, far too many trashy newspapers and watched too much TV to have a balanced view on reality. Also, I read a LOT of comics which obviously deeply affected my attitude toward every day situations. With these influences fuelling my somewhat erratic to approach toward my future intentions, I inwardly began to shape my destiny. Or destinies, I should say. At any one point in my younger days I imagined myself to be a professional Soccer Player, a TV and Film Actor / Director, a Model (that’s where my imagination really fooled me), an architect, a doctor, an Archeologist (thanks Indiana Jones), a Smuggler (and yes, thanks Han Solo) and a Journalist. And all this was before I had actually left my bedroom and ventured to my sanctuary, the library. As a teenager with too much time on his hands, varied and bizarre information sources equal unchecked ambition and rampant, misguided egomania. This was followed by the crushing realisation that you were not, in fact, superhuman but simply a teenage boy with a feverish imagination desperately in need of an outlet.

So writing it was, and writing it remains. And whilst my ambitions have become certainly more tempered as the years have passed, my passion remains undimmed. As does my belief that one day I will discover my real superpower.

My Pitch

Good day to you all and welcome to my first real post.

Thank you for the messages of welcome and good luck, it was very much appreciated and immediately made me feel part of this fine community. However, to all of you that didn’t wish me well, I ask you all in turn, why do you hate me already? I am a very fragile person and prone to spilling out my insecurities and personality disorders directly onto the page. If you don’t automatically love me and my writing I am liable to write great screeds of self loathing, angst ridden poerty that isn’t funny at all and then it’s only you, lovely reader, that will suffer. And besides, there’s plenty of time for building up an informed and deep seated resentment of me once you know me a little better!

Only kidding, I promise no poetry. Not even a limerick. I do not promise no literary breakdowns however, that will probably happen at some point.

Anyhoo, in Deb’s annoucement post she mentions a pitch letter I sent to her to try and secure the advertised position of ‘Humorous Blogger’. I had remembered the University application letter of a Scottish person in regards to his entrance consideration and thought it the ideal format for an application. Whereas his was basically a stream of conciousness of the surreal made-up things he had done (precision tennis raquet throwing, speed tromboning and the like), all mine are based in fact and have a personal, sketchy origin.

I hope it goes someway to introducing me and I guess, in a strange way, it’s my pitch to you as well.

Hello Deborah,

I am replying to your search for a humorous blogger for the originally fun intended ‘Freelance Writing Jobs’ blog. As you stated in your ad, I would like to help you bring the funny back.

I believe I fit your requirements for a number of reasons. I have written for a number of blogs (Londonist, The Offside, AmChron etc.) and been generally well received as a funny writer but the remit has always been a little narrow and unrepresentative of my true passions; Comedy and Writing.

I would love to write about the strange foibles of writers and their routines (i.e. WH Auden was effectively drugged up his entire writing life!), odd writing tips (i.e. slip the key under the door after you’ve locked yourself in to your writing space, hope someone finds you), quirky popular genres (Star Trek Erotic Fan Fiction focussing on Kirk and Spock’s romance) etc. etc. ad infinitum.

At this point, I presume, you may like some more information about me. Well, I am British (Welsh actually), lofty, less than dynamic and I am often seen staring at ornate houses or making strong Gin Martinis and Rum Sours. My past is not chequered but I have failed as a soccer player, a paper boy, a charity worker and a wine waiter. All still haunt me.

I am trying to write books, situation comedies, stand-up routines, articles, blogs, scriptures, missives and sometimes humorous emails. I manage time relatively efficiently and I can tread water but distance swimming is a problem due to poor coaching as a boy. I have been able to ride a bike for many years now, a skill that gives me a sense of tremendous well-being but I remain fearful of its awesome power.

I curse openly, freely, sometimes loudly, but always heartily and with the best intentions, much like a pirate I’d imagine. Effing and jeffing, as it is sometimes known here, is recognised as a skill, right or wrong; and I am seen as more of a man by some and as a slob and illiterate by others. The latter are correct but both, in all senses, fascinate me.
At times I have displayed astounding catching skills and cat-like reactions, at other times clumsiness beyond conventional physical understanding. I am able to play no musical instruments but can recognise 95% of them by sight alone. I am an efficient climber of trees. I like to cook and regularly ignore cooking times and chopping
instructions. I would be considered a maverick in the rigid and conforming hospitality student circles. I do not have criminal record, nor do I want one, thank you.

I like to think of myself of a protector of the people but would be considered a coward and a blaggard by those same people if I ever stated my view. I can twirl a staff like a Kung Fu expert but however impressive it looks I have painfully found out it is not an essential life skill.

Ants astound me as they are organised enough to have possess armies (which is as unsettling as it is impressive). Armadillos strike me as nice guys, bears as misunderstood and jelly fish as just downright
irresponsible. Dogs and children trust me, cats respect me and monkeys are strangely calm around me. I believe they sense my acceptance of our shared ancestry.

Constant exposure to the radiation of the Sun has not facilitated any superpowers (except the ability to find the perfect name for things, I am currently sitting on Lenny the leather chair) but may have contributed to my loftiness. I can hit many objects with sticks and bats to an advanced level. I can throw. I like shopping.

I balance, I duck and weave, I dodge, I frolic, I gambol, I skip, I dance the funky chicken (badly) and pay my bills on time. Long phone calls make my ear go uncomfortably hot.

I have a fair idea where Elvis is.

I hope this gives you a view of my mark as a writer.

Kind Regards,

Simon J. James