1.
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
— Jack London
2.
“I hate writing, I love having written.”
— Dorothy Parker
3.
“I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”
— Peter De Vries
4.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Maya Angelou
5.
“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank piece of paper (or a blank screen), and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
— Neil Gaiman
6.
“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”
— Gloria Steinem
7.
“Write drunk. Edit sober.”
— (often attributed to Hemingway, but who really knows? Either way, it’s solid advice)
8.
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”
— Richard Bach
9.
“If you want to write, you have to write. You don’t wait for the muse to show up, you invite her in by sitting down to work.”
— Jodi Picoult
10.
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
— Stephen King
11.
“Start before you’re ready. Don’t prepare, begin.”
— James Clear
12.
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
— Toni Morrison
13.
“You don’t need more time. You need a deadline.”
— Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo
14.
“Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.”
— Jane Smiley
15.
“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.”
— Erica Jong
16.
“An indie author’s success is never guaranteed, but neither is failure—so you might as well take the leap.”
— Unknown (but it sounds like something we’d say here!)
17.
“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”
— Khaled Hosseini
18.
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
— Terry Pratchett
19.
“Done is better than perfect.”
— Sheryl Sandberg
20.
“Don’t be ‘a writer.’ Be writing.”
— William Faulkner
Bonus quotes from PIFW recent posts:
1.
“Consistency beats inspiration every time. When you write every day—whether it’s 50 words or 5,000—you train your brain to show up even when it doesn’t want to.”
2.
“Writing is hard. Some days, it’s staring at a blank page until your soul starts to shrivel. Other days, it’s forcing words onto the page that feel as clunky as a toddler’s first steps.”
3.
“The beauty of disfluency is that it forces you to innovate. When the work feels hard, you’re not failing—you’re growing.”
4.
“In today’s indie fiction world, the ability to write and publish quickly, while still writing well, gives the indie author a powerful advantage.”
5.
“Reap the benefits from Tracy Cooper-Posey’s twenty years plus in the publishing industry, right here, every week.”
