What writers and others say
“Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.”
— Sholem Asch, American novelist, dramatist and essayist
“Rule No. 1 in all this is that you have to really have a command of the material before you sit down and write.”
— Mark Barabak, senior political writer, Los Angeles Times
“Notes are like Velcro. As you try to skim them, they ensnare you, and pretty soon you can’t see the story for the details. The story is not in my notes. The story is in my head.”
— Jane Harrigan, professor of journalism at the University of New Hampshire
“My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”
— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist
“Writing is no trouble: you just jot down the ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself … it is the occurring which is difficult.”
— Stephen Leacock, Canadian humorist
“‘Thinking is the great unappreciated and understated part’ of being a journalist.”
— David Maraniss, best-selling author and Washington Post writer and editor
“In my own somewhat narrow experience, the value of writing seems to be in inverse proportion to the ease of writing. Whatever flows freely and bubblingly turns out to be sorry stuff a week later.”
— H.L. Mencken, American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic
“Do not confuse stenography with writing. Step back. Put the notes away. Take out a pad of paper. Think about the story. Tell it to yourself or a trusted editor or colleague. What surprised you, what did you learn, what one thing above everything else?”
— Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, in Writing to Deadline
“Donald Graves … discovered that the best writers rehearsed what they were going to write before they began. I found this was also true of the best writers on newspapers. They had been writing the story in their head — and often in their reporter’s notebook — before they went out on their story, while they were reporting, and all the way back to their desks.”
— Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, in Writing to Deadline
“The hard part is getting to the top of page one.”
— Tom Stoppard, Academy Award- and Tony Award-winning playwright
“Why write a thesis when what you need is a tweet?”
— Ann Wylie, president of Wylie Communications Inc.
“The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.”
― A. B. Yehoshua, Israeli novelist
Work with — not against — your brain
While we talk a lot about what to write — More stories! Fewer words! Shorter sentences! — we don’t focus so much on how.
Writing is hard because we weren’t taught how to write. Instead, we were taught how to edit: how to spell, punctuate and use the right grammar.
But there is a how to writing. Learn a few simple steps that will make your writing time more effective and efficient at Write Better, Easier & Faster — our writing-process workshops.
You’ll learn to invest your time where it’ll do you the most good … stop committing creative incest … even save time by editing before writing.
