Tips from professional authors

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut." ~ Stephen King

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

"I don't wait for my muse to wander by, I go out and drag her home by the hair." ~ Rise Sheriden-Peters

" To be yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting".~ e.e. cummings

" The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." ~ Robert Cormier

" A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." ~ Richard Bach

" That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but that our ability to do has increased." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

" The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write." ~ Gabriel Fielding

" If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." ~ Toni Morrison

" Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." ~ Cyril Connolly

" You did what you knew how to do, and when you knew better, you did better." ~ Maya Angelou

" The universe is made of stories, not atoms." ~ Muriel Rukeyser

" I'm scared all the time, which is always good. You have to be scared or you're not working hard enough." ~ Sue Grafton