Are you frustrated with your writing? Tired of writing words you know aren’t as good as you want them to be? Frustrated writer, I know why.
A weird thing happens when we finally sit down to write The Book: we expect it to come out as magnificently as we think it should. We see or feel what it should be, and hey—we’ve read and written stuff all our lives, right? It should just come out!
But it doesn’t.
This is normal.
This week, we lost an incredible writer. Toni Morrison was a novelist, essayist, editor, professor, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her perhaps most well-known book, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey.
In honor of Black History Month, I want to share five quotes from black authors that are sure to give you the push you need to write something fantastic.
Recently my publisher recommended I read the novel “If Beale Street Could Talk” by James Baldwin.
Baldwin is known by many for being a political writer during the Civil Rights movement, but what struck me about Beale Street was how he conveyed this emotion. He does such a great job making me feel Tish’s love, desperation, etc. throughout the book such that I found myself thinking, “how did he do that?”
How did Baldwin so successfully evoke emotion in Beale Street? Here are some of the answers I came up with.
For those of us who’ve been in the writing biz a while, there is a quote by Stephen King we’ve all seen a thousand times (and if you’re new to writing, fear not: you’ll see this quote a thousand times, too).
Ernest Hemingway was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Most writers seem to either love him—and are influenced by his clear, direct prose—or hate him. Many seek the internet for Hemingway quotes, either to seek inspiration or wisdom.
Regardless of your personal feelings, Ernest Hemingway’s insight into the craft of writing is unparalleled, as you’ll see.
This article shares some interesting facts and and quotes that drip with emotional honesty from one of the great American authors.
Read on to see famous quotes you can use as guiding principles in your writing and personal life.
Something happened to you. Maybe last year, or maybe twenty-five years ago, but it left its mark. It could be a crazy adventure or journey, or a massive trauma—or just a period of your life that really shaped who you’ve become. And you’d like to write it up as a book. The question is, should you write it as a memoir—or could it work better as a roman à clef?
Your decision will determine whether you stick as closely to real life as you can, or embellish and change things a little (or a lot) and call it fiction.
Writing in roman à clef is a choice many memoir writers make after deciding they need to fictionalize their story—and there’s nothing wrong with that!
In this article, you’ll learn exactly what roman à clef is, some guidelines of how to write a story using it, and why this choice can make a surprising—possibly better—direction for your future book.
