Self-murder and other editing tools

I came across a quote recently that, to me, stands among the brilliant statements of a writing career:

Ruthlessness with one's own copy remains the mark of a professional, because you have to stab yourself in the back. - Paul Collins, How to Write Like A Victorian

Collins was writing about the first "how-to" writing book, written in the 1890s, and how it's advice is very similar to the tips writers receive today. It is somewhat ironic that the writer, Sherwin Cody, really didn't have a track record of writing fiction, but he blazed a trail of Victorian writers into that pernicious field of fiction.

Collins point is an excellent one. It is no surprise that the title editors and agents always encourage writers to pick up is "Self-editing for Fiction Writers." (BTW, did you know SEFFW is on Facebook now?) The ability to take a firm stand with one's own work is really one of the marks of the writers that have the best chance of succeeding in publishing. The other, sometimes, is the combination of nerve and nose that Cody demonstrated in the late 1800s. (See the full article here - it's a good read.)

While you ponder that, here's a very funny look at the writer not willing to mess with his own work. Maybe you'll recognize him.

Sound theories on writing for children?

“They seem to regard books for children with the same tolerant tenderness with which nearly any adult regards a child. Most of us assume there is something good in every child; the critics go on from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory.”

– Katharine White (Mrs. E.B.White) quoted in
The New Yorker, 7-21-08 “The Lion and the Mouse”

A quick thought

I've been immersed lately in business writing. It's been filling all my spare moments and then some.

Apart from the fact that it pays well, I consider it a whetstone for my writing - it keeps me sharp and it keeps my editorial knife keen. In fact, it makes me practice this adage:

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

~Elmore Leonard

Times are bad

I saw this quote in a fellow writer's tag line and it gave me quite a chuckle:

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is
writing a book."
~Cicero, 106-43 BC

New goals

So last week I was thinking about goals that I had/hadn't reached yet. And was thinking that it's a new year, it's time to get the new list together. And found a great list at this blog. And generally have dragged my toes for 9 whole hours of the new year about goal setting.

But in sorting through some notes today, I found this quote scrawled on a scrap of paper:

"Most of us learn to write well by writing badly for a long, long time."

(Sue Grafton in Snoopy's Guide to Writing)

I like that. I think I have a goal now. :)

Happy New Year everyone, and
all the best to you as you write
- good OR bad!

A writing quote

"The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story."

--John le Carre

Seeing a story

"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any."

--Orson Scott Card

Children's writers (a quote)

I was catching up on a older version of a WOW! newsletter, and came across this great quote that Esther Hershenhorn attributes to a friend in her interview there:

“Children’s book creators are actually long-ago friends from another time and place who have simply and suddenly reconnected.”

I made a few of those connections last weekend, and I must say that they are always eminently satisfying. Although in one case, it was not a person. It was a book. A delightful and instant long-lost friend sitting on a library shelf.

Where do you plan to connect with some "long-ago friends" this year?

Quotes about writing and writers

"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good
writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't
see any."
--Orson Scott Card

"What a mistake for an author to emerge from her secret fastness. Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations."
--Ariadne Oliver in Agatha Christie's "Mrs. McGinty's Dead"

"Revision is like wrestling with a demon, for almost anyone can write; but only writers know how to rewrite. It is this ability alone that turns the amateur into a professional."
-- William Knott

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see
as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
--E L Doctorow

"Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to
write his memoirs."
--David Ben Gurion

"Good fledgling writers are like 6-year-old hockey players. They're not very good. They think they're awesome. They get better with practice. When they fall down, they get back up."
-- Sigmund Brouwer


“You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it’s going to be too difficult for grownups, you write it for children.”
—Madeleine L’Engle

"Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up."
--Ursula K. LeGuin

"When we read, we start at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out."
--Vickie Karp

"No one is asking, let alone demanding, that you write. The world
is not waiting with bated breath for your article or book. Whether
or not you get a single word on paper, the sun will rise, the earth
will spin, the universe will expand. Writing is forever and always
a choice -- your choice."
--Beth Mende Conny

"Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled
with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over
yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the
world."
--Tom Clancy

"There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder."
--Brian Aldiss

"There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

"It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them."
--Anne Tyler

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
--Douglas Adams

"I am dying. I am about to die. Either is correct."
--French grammarian Bonhourre's last words on his deathbed

"Writing is a process in which we discover what lives within us. The writing, itself, reveals what is alive! The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know."
--Henri Nouwen

"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write."
--William Makepeace Thackeray

"There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it."
--Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent forwriting, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."
--Robert Benchley

"If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers."
--Irwin S. Cobb, author and journalist (1876-1944)

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader--not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."
--E.L. Doctorow

"Books aren't written; they're rewritten. Including your own.It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it."
--Michael Crichton

Should you write? Perhaps the advice applies that an olderpastor once gave a young man thinking of becoming a preacher. "If you don't have to, don't."
– Stanley C. Baldwin

"Never underestimate the power of a woman, especially if she has a pencil in her hand or her mouth open."
--Columnist Phyllis Kendrick quoted in The Vegreville News Advertiser, Nov. 15, 1983

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
--Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

"Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence
that sawing wood is what he was intended for."
--Mark Twain

"Writing, which is my form of celebration and prayer, is also my way of inquiry."
--Diane Ackerman

"When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do."
--Anne Sexton

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
--Jack London

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon."
--Robert Cromier

"Yes, I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers."
--T.S. Eliot

"Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say."
--Sharon O'Brien

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all."
--Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

"I have heard it said that rats collect trinkets," he wrote in a 1938 essay, "that if you expose a rat's nest, you may find bright bits of glass and other small desirable objects. A child's mind is such a repository -- full of gems of questionable merit, paste and real, held in storage. What shining jewels shall we contribute this morning, sir, to this amazing collection?"
-– E.B.White

"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove; you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain."
--Elie Wiesel