quotes

I was trying to find a quote by, I think, C. S. Lewis, but I could not. However, I found several lists of quotes and because I just feel like following the crowd tonight, I’m going to post some of my favorite. If you would like to read them all, you can find them here. I’m thinking about taking some of the really interesting ones and writing my own opinions about them as well.

For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me. –Jack Dann

Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish. –Monica Dickens

There are many reasons why novelists write – but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world. –John Fowles

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.–Melinda Haynes

Writing also includes the possibility of living many lives as well as living in any time or world possible.–Virpi Hämeen-Anttila

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly. –John D. MacDonald

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. –William Faulkner

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.–William Zinsser

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster. –Isaac Asimov

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.–E. L. Doctorow

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it. –Harlan Ellison

Writing is a crummy profession, but a good hobby. –Paavo Haavikko

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing. –Eugene Ionesco

Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.–Stephen King

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.–Ursula K. LeGuin

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to. –Somerset Maugham

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them..–Charles Caleb Colton

A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge. –Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Imagination is more important than knowledge. –Albert Einstein

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper. –T. S. Eliot

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.–Natalie Goldberg

For all my longer works, for example novels, I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on. –Garth Nix

When in doubt, blow something up. –J. Michael Straczynski

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.–Orson Scott Card

Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep. –Catherine O’Hara

And, finally, I shall end with a very fitting saying that sums up how I just wasted a half of hour reading all of these quotes.

Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.–Anonymous

our worlds

i’ve never been much of a fan of Harry Potter. I’ve always said, however, that Rowlings should never write more after she finishes with the series. She should just finish with Harry Potter and never write a single story about that universe again.

I’ve also said that, no matter how famous of a series I was to write, I would never write more than I planned. It isn’t right. Just, finish with the universe and be done with it.

Why? Because I hate it when authors find a universe they feel comfortable in and just keep writing it, having everything tie back to the stories. (If you desire an example, Ted Dekker’s circle Trilogy. Pretty decent three books for mainline Christian. But he then writes a Paradise series that references it. (Horrid book, the first one BTW) And he writes two or three other series based off of that one. Ick, ick, ick, all of them. Will not read or recommend any of Ted Dekker’s series books again because of it.) It gets to the point that It’s like, give up already. Can’t you write something new and original by now?

Anyway, I finished watching Lord of the Rings today. (I’ve been watching all three over this Christmas break.) It’s strange. I started looking at it automatically from a literary point of view.

Just think of thinks. Tolkien designed a geographic location with such details as the plains, and those plains and cities and each city has its own history. My dad is explaining stuff the movie does not and it is amazing how much detail just goes into everything.

Then, he creates a language. At least one, where he has Elvish.

He creates each species of the people: men, dwarfs, elves, hobbits, orcs, the other ugly creatures, wizards, not to mention goblins, eagles, dead, mountain men, and anyone else I forgot. Each of these people have pretty much their own history developed as well, so example it is believable and awesome.

Now that Tolkien as created this world, he writes about it. And he doesn’t write about it for just one little story. He writes it in three, separate, huge novels, probably on a typewriter, so it isn’t as easy to change things as it it is now. He draws it together in such a way that the three novels, although, yes, they lag (i’ve only listened to Fellowship of the Rings.), but there is so much in them that it is stunning and beautiful and you can practically see it as you write and as you think about it.

Then it’s over. The maps go away. The dictionary guidelines you wrote get stored in the bottom drawer. The notes are useless now. And it’s over, just like that. Middle Earth slowly fades away.

But you still love it. Your home is back there amid the shire and the elves and hobbits and wizards. It’s like your special, magical place and the characters in the stories are your friends. You still think about them, even though the story is over.

As such, I understand now why authors go back to their masterpieces. Their masterpieces have their whole spirit inside of it. It’s like going home and writing about home. And even I did that with Kontyo. It’s the same universe; if anyone was to read Shad, they would see the similarities and they would recognize the story.

On another note, I’ve been thinking about creating my own Galaxy, since I write science fiction. The idea behind that is if I can create a believable enough galaxy, and have all my stories operate within this general area, I will eventually have such a complex universe that it is very believable, with all sorts of background and details and things. However, since it is as large as a certain area of the galaxy, the stories will never really overlap and become icky. Toss in different dates and things become even murkier, but just as awesome I would think.

I’m still playing with this idea, but I think it is something plausible. As much as I love creating worlds, eventually I’ll want to go back to something new I would think. Obviously, not everything would be. I still have a current world comedy I hope to write someday. But I think it would be interesting to pursue. (And I have the time too, to develop such a complex place, seeing as I have a good fifty years of writing ahead of me.)