"I always wanted to be a writer but it wasn’t until I began to enjoy writing that people wanted to read my story."
— Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (source)
"It helps to remember why we got into this whole fiction-writing ‘business’ to begin with: because we wanted to see what was behind that door, if not to break it down altogether. Because writers are born snoops and eavesdroppers and gossips and sneaky little diary readers just about driven by what we don’t know. We’re not expressing ourselves in our writing so much as we are searching for the otherwise inexpressible."
— Max Winter (source)
"If you ask people to think about it, they’re probably vaguely aware that writers agree to blurb books because they have some connection, either professional or personal, to the author – but the genre seems to demand a certain effacement of those connections, as though Famous Author X just happened to come across a delightful manuscript that somebody accidentally left in a Starbucks and was so taken with it he felt compelled to say something really nice about it."
"The OED tells us suspense is, in part, ‘a state of mental uncertainty, with expectation of or desire for decision, and usually some apprehension or anxiety; the condition of waiting, esp. of being kept waiting, for an expected decision, assurance, or issue.’ As writers, then, our task is to create those sensations—uncertainty, expectation, desire, apprehension, anxiety, waiting—in readers. Through mere words and sentences. That somehow they will translate and believe."
— Bryn Chancellor, “How to Write Suspense” (link)
"Nobody else lives your life, just you. Unless you’re a ghost who’s taken over a person’s body. If so, whoa, please don’t come looking for me. Regardless, when you see other people succeed and do awesome things, you’ll get jealous. But their success doesn’t diminish you. They didn’t eat any part of the pie you were trying to get. The only person you should be comparing yourself to is yourself from six months ago. Are you doing better? Stay on track. Are you not? Make some changes and check in six months from now."
