RESOURCES-TIPS: For writers of all genre who want to write, and the readers who love them.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
- Somerset Maugham

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary -- it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
- Somerset Maugham

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
- Alice Munro

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil -- but there is no way around them.
Isaac Asimov

To write fiction, one need a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
- Aldus Huxley

Get it down. Take changes. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good.
- William Faulkner

Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including our own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
- Michael Crichton

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.
- Ray Bradbury

How to Quit Writing and End up on the Bestseller Lists

Motivation, RESOURCES-TIPS

By Shirley Jump

Several years ago, I spoke at a writer’s group in Pennsylvania. I was a little daunted. It was the biggest group I’d ever spoken to, and many of the writers there had credentials I could only dream of having. But as I told my story my journey as a write rthe room got silent. Why? Because everyone in that room, published or not, could relate to the tale I told.

I spoke about quitting, about giving up your dream and throwing it all away in a fit of frustration. I had done that myself, in June of 2001.

And in November of 2006 my name was on the New York Times list, the USA Today list with my fourteenth book (SUGAR AND SPICE) and I had contracts for several more. I’d become a nationally bestselling author in five years.

Five years. Not a lot of time, but, oh my how things have changed.

Everywhere I go, someone I meet can relate to giving up on a dream. We’ve all had those moments where our dream — whatever it may be — seems unattainable. You work and work, hoping to catch a break and achieve your goals and all you get is slammed doors and a broken heart.