justcallmethelion
Fun fact, my mom used to own a lion king fanfic mailing list so I guess you can say this shit is in my blood 05/14/19 NOTE: I will never leave an unsigned review unless we're friends. If you ever get a review from "justcallmethelion" it AINT ME. If you do see one please contact me in a PM and I can tell you myself that it wasn't me. UPDATE 08/18/19: I've finished a summer break internship in South Africa shadowing an equine vet I'll call Dr. Lindsey for privacy purposes. She is the sole caretaker for a wide range of small farms in her area and we were busy at all times and frankly I feel on top of the world and have for weeks! I start my third semester of pre-vet next week. UPDATE 3/19/20: I never leave nasty messages as PMs. I don't have the time and I do not care please I barely have time and care in me for sleeping 5 -6 hours a night. “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” JD Salinger “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” Stephen King “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” “All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.” “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” “It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.” “Style is to forget all styles.” “I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” “The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.” “One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” “Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.” “Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” “Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.” “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” “I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.” “The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.” “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” “Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.” “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” “To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.” “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.” “For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.” “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.” “We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.” “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” “Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” “Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.” “I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.” “There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.” “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” “I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.” “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” “Writers are always selling somebody out.” “Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.” “Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.” “There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.” “Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.” “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” “The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.” “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” “You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop—H2O. The reader will get it.” “When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.” “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” “If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!” “Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.” “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” “When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” “Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.” |
