I don’t know about you, but there are days when writing takes more from me than it gives me. Days when “living the dream” makes me want to pull the covers up over my head and just stay in bed.
Usually I deal with the “why am I doing this?” days a few different ways:
- Skyping with my mentor
- IMing with another writer who feels exactly I do –where we grouse and grumble and threaten to quit and go try out for Broadway
- Meeting a friend for breakfast that lasts all the way into the lunch hour
- Walking outside in the fresh Colorado sunshine and not talking about writing
- Shopping … because, you know, shopping always helps!
All of these techniques encourage me and motivate me, but when I’m discouraged as a writer, sometimes I need inspiration. And being a bit of a quote freak, I’ve found there’s nothing like a good quote to inspire me! So today I want to share 10 writer quote-spirations with you:
- “You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.” ~Margaret Atwood (1939-), Canadian poet & novelist
- “Fiction writers are judged by the emotional authenticity of their work. To create authentic feelings in their characters, they must first call up their own.” ~Ralph Keyes (1945-), author
- “There isn’t any secret. You sit down and start and that’s it.” ~Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), novelist
- “Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of the ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.” ~William Zinsser (1922-), writer & editor
- “The creative act is inherently an act of courage.” ~Erwin Raphael McManus (1958-), author & lecturer
- “One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems to be good for a later book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.” ~ Annie Dillard (1945), author
- “If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.” ~ Ralph Keyes (1945-), author
- “Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” ~William Faulkner (1897-1962), writer & Nobel prize laureate
- “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life; they feed the soul.” ~Anne Lamott (1954-), writer
- “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), writer
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