What writers & others say
“If I could have had a job as a professional reader, I would have much preferred that to writing.”
— Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and wait for drops of blood to form on your forehead.”
— Gene Fowler, author and journalist
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, American novelist
“For 40-odd years in this noble profession, I’ve harbored a guilt and my conscience is smitten. So here is my slightly embarrassed confession – I don’t like to write, but I love to have written.”
— Michael Kanin, screenwriter of “Woman of the Year” and other movies
“Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead.”
— Ann-Marie MacDonald, author, The Way the Crow Flies
“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
— Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize-winning author
“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, 20th-century journalist and social critic
“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.”
— Olin Miller, aphorist
“When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.”
— Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Spanish playwright and novelist
“Writing is hard work. Any time it comes easy, suspect it.”
— Chip Scanlan, affiliate faculty member, The Poynter Institute
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.
