Walter Mosley Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Two, Scary

  Walter Mosley (2009). “This Year You Write Your Novel”, p.7, Hachette UK

• The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Journey, Creating

  Walter Mosley (2009). “This Year You Write Your Novel”, p.10, Hachette UK

• If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning.

  Walter Mosley

  Morning, Children, Writing

• The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day - every morning or every night, whatever time it is that you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your best work.

  Walter Mosley

  Morning, Writing, Night

  Walter Mosley (2009). “This Year You Write Your Novel”, p.7, Hachette UK

• I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.

  Walter Mosley

  War, Writing, Cubicles

• ... you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words - so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that.

  Walter Mosley

  Song, Book, Love You

• ... We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.

  Walter Mosley

  Character, Writing, Blood

  Walter Mosley (2009). “This Year You Write Your Novel”, p.28, Hachette UK

• This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Expectations, Criticism

  Walter Mosley (2009). “This Year You Write Your Novel”, p.31, Hachette UK

• Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Mutation, Fiction

• My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.

  Walter Mosley

  Jobs, Writing, People

  Source: bigthink.com

• I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just... it's just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don't work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don't fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Normal, Stories

  Source: bigthink.com

• I'm writing, I'm using language, I'm using that language to tell stories and even more so to get ideas across. And I just love that, and I've always loved that.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Ideas, Stories

  Big Think Interview with Andrew Dermont, bigthink.com. November 10, 2010.

• All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Needs, Want

• Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Procrastination, Hands

  Walter Mosley (2009). “This Year You Write Your Novel”, p.9, Hachette UK

• One of the things that I love about being a writer is this. I wake up every day and I write for three hours. I wake up early. So like 6:00, 7:00 in the morning, I write till 9:00 or 10:00. I live in New York, nobody even is breathing until 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning. So, it's like my writing life is completely removed from the rest of my life.

  Walter Mosley

  Morning, New York, Writing

  Big Think Interview with Andrew Dermont, bigthink.com. November 10, 2010.

• I don't ever know where I'm going. Because one of the wonderful things about writing, which is different than working in programming, you don't need to know. You could just write and discover where you're going. And it's a great deal of fun.

  Walter Mosley

  Fun, Writing, Different

• The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.

  Walter Mosley

  Morning, Book, Writing

  Source: bigthink.com

• One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times.

  Walter Mosley

  Book, Writing, Numbers

  Big Think Interview with Andrew Dermont, November 10, 2010.

• Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.

  Walter Mosley

  Book, Writing, Growing

  Source: bigthink.com

• Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.

  Walter Mosley

  Book, Writing, Ideas

  Big Think Interview with Andrew Dermont, bigthink.com. November 10, 2010.

• Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.

  Walter Mosley

  Dream, Giving Up, Writing

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

• I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

  Walter Mosley

  Writing, Thinking, World

  Source: bigthink.com

• The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.

  Walter Mosley

  Book, Writing, Talking

  Source: bigthink.com

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