Keep Writing

Quotes to keep the pen on paper, pads on keyboard:

Write what horrifies you, write what charms you, write what repels you, write what you love, write, to be aphoristic, what you cannot stop yourself from writing.

Yes, you will have to find “your voice,” and yes, you will have to learn the craft of writing, which is endlessly demanding and so varied that you will probably never feel you are more than a clumsy student. And don’t limit yourself to study only the craft necessary to produce your particular kind of writing ...
But all of those necessary skills are servants to your Lord and Master: write what you cannot stop yourself from thinking about, even if it disgusts everyone you know. Readers read to subsume their consciousness, for a profound but limited time, into another’s. Some want reassurance, some want challenge. Some want pleasant lies, some painful realities. You may be unlucky and be fated to have a small audience. That’s too bad. (By the way, it is the fate of almost every writer.)  

Over time, if you work hard and write what obsesses you, there will be readers who will want to live in your peculiar universe, and precisely because what you have provided is rare they will be all the more grateful for your creation. -- Rafael Yglesias, American novelist

What I try to do with myself is just avoid the success or failure thing. Because there is so much about writing that is out of the writer's control. Not the action of doing it, but whether it comes alive or not. If I begin thinking in terms of failure, what happens is I get really depressed, and the game is over, because I've already decided. -- David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008, author of Infinite Jest

We both have a passionate and joyfully reckless belief that a simple act of creativity can better the world in wildly unexpected ways. -- Grant Faulkner, new executive director of NaNoWriMo, speaking of his predecessor, Chris Baty