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Frank Ball writing in his study

The quote library

Frankisms

Short truths, collected over a lifetime of writing and teaching. Read a few, or lose an afternoon.

Collected
669
  • With dialogue, pull onto the highway, not the driveway. — Tim Shoemaker

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  • Without an authentic character personality, no amount of external decoration can conceal the fact that the mannequin under it all is the same mannequin under all the others. — Jeff Gerke

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  • Without conflict, you have no action; without action, you have no character; without character, you have no story. — Syd Field

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  • Without serendipitous discoveries, your story runs the risk of feeling artificial and prepackaged. — Steven James

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  • Word by word the great books are written. — Voltaire

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  • Words are loaded pistols. — Jean-Paul Sartre

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  • Words are the battered trunks that carry remnants of experience across the plains of time. — Ian Robertson

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  • Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind. — Rudyard Kipling

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  • Words tend to lose emphasis to the degree they are surrounded by competing words or ideas. — Theodore A. Rees Cheney

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  • Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail. — Ernest Hemingway

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  • Write about people! I think this is the hardest thing we as Christian writers have to deal with. We want to write about issues. — Kim Messer

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  • Write every day, and your writing grows faster than by simple accumulation. Like a retirement account it will bear interest. — Jane Anne Staw

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  • Writers can change the way people think simply by giving them a glimpse of life through their characters' eyes. — Lisa Cron

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  • Writers must be keen observers. — Verdell Krisher, author and Christian school director

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  • Writers must be readers. — Verdell Krisher, author and Christian school director

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  • Writers must be word collectors. — Verdell Krisher, author and Christian school director

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  • Writers who form a complex character and environment can create unpredictable behavior—responses that are true to a personality but not foreseen. — DiAnn Mills

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  • Writers write about things that other people don’t pay much attention to. — Natalie Goldberg

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  • Writing a book is an adventure: it begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant. — Winston Churchill

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  • Writing a practice synopsis before you’ve started your manuscript is a good way to indicate to yourself where your novel will begin and end, and what it will say. — James Thom

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  • Writing block is a system of fear. — Jane Anne Staw

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  • Writing brings its own rewards. Enjoy them. — Syd Field

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  • Writing is a job like any other. You succeed by virtue of working at it. — Elizabeth George

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  • Writing is a learned coordination; the more you do the easier it gets. — Syd Field

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  • Writing is a visual art. Check that your writing has pictures. — Natalie Goldberg

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  • Writing is about self-expression, about depicting the world within your heart, your memory, your mind. To depict this world, a writer needs to feel safe. — Jane Anne Staw

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  • Writing is an experiential process, a learning process involving the acquisition of skill and coordination, like riding a bicycle, swimming, dancing, or playing tennis. — Syd Field

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  • Writing is inherently a much more natural process if we learn to flow with, rather than fight, the natural cooperative rhythms of the hemispheres of our brain. — Gabriele Lusser Rico

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  • Writing is like fishing. You’ve got to keep your line in the water. — Alex Porter

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  • Writing is not a McDonald’s hamburger. The cooking is slow, and in the beginning you are not sure whether a roast or a banquet or a lamb chop will be the result. — Natalie Goldberg

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  • Writing is not for the weak-hearted. It’s a contact sport. — DiAnn Mills

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  • Writing is the ability to ask yourself questions and get the answers. — Syd Field

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  • Writing quality fiction means a lifetime of learning and challenging ourselves. — DiAnn Mills

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  • Written dialogue is more organized for ease of reading and understanding. — Cheryl St.John

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  • You can have the cleverest plot ever and use perfect grammar, but if you don’t create people your audience will identify with and root for—or hate, as the case may be—you don’t have a book worthy of publication. — Cheryl St.John

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  • You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it. — Voltaire

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  • You can say a writer practices being dumb. Only a dummy would stand out in the rain and watch a puddle. — Natalie Goldberg

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  • You can take your reader anywhere you want him to go, from gritty reality to far-out fantasy, as long as you make him believe. — Cheryl St.John

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  • You can’t say “Life sucks” until you have given us a picture of it: a man lying in the gutter, mosquitoes feeding at his open sores, the tongue of his right shoe hanging out, his pockets turned inside out, his eyes stunned closed, and his skin a pale yellow. — Natalie Goldberg

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  • You cannot know where a story needs to go until you know where it’s been, but you cannot know where it needs to have been until you know where it’s going. — Steven James

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