Rob Bignell's Blog

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A hero knows it takes hard work and a long time to get published; a fool thinks it should happen immediately, because he thinks he���s a hero already.

Sometimes writing a novel feels about as rewarding as turning a spit in the fires of hell.

Structure is translation software for your imagination.

Good writers are good readers.

To make it as a writer you need to be two things: systematic and relentless.

Are you a real writer? Then keep writing. And don't stop. Ever.

The exclamation point is a loud party-goer, demanding attention. Overdone, it can be annoying.

The ���feel��� of a short story should be that it follows one trajectory, or arc. It concerns a character (or, in some cases, a group) heading through one primary crisis or concern.

A quirky, colorful character overstays her welcome after a few chapters, unless trouble comes calling.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.

Writing is hard for every last one of us���straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can���t write - really that���s exactly what you need to write.

And if you're gonna be a writer, you just truly have to be a writer. You have to throw yourself into it and deal with the negative consequences of that. And there are negative consequences. I mean, there are. But, it's also true that you wouldn't be interviewing me right now if I had worked at the post office. You wouldn't. I would be still writing, but I wouldn't have gotten as far as I've gotten, because I wouldn't have had the time.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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Examine every word you put on paper. You���ll find a surprising number that don���t serve any purpose.

The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.

���bear in mind, when you���re choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning. The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.

I started to write. And I wrote and wrote all through high school.

My characters often start out with a loss of some sort, usually a loss of emotion or purpose or hope. What I do in the course of my writing is weave a thematic arc of fulfillment. It is my constant theme as a creator.

The only way to help your unique literary voice grow and eventually sing like a glorious creature of wonder is to write what you excites you into a creative passion and brings you pure unadulterated joy.

Everything I write now might have roots in myths, often disguised, often dissolved into new multi-ethnic myths of my own making.

My advice for aspiring writers is threefold. First, read as much as possible, both within and outside the genre you are working in. By reading you hone your internal ear for style. Second, write. Everything comes down to it; unless you write, you are not a writer. Third, submit your work. But - stop chasing every seductive new market out there, and stop trying to write for the tastes of specific established professional markets and editors. That way lies mediocrity and eventual dissolution of your true voice, no matter how embryonic or pronounced it may be now.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

I have rewritten ��� often several times ��� every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I write entirely to find out what I���m thinking, what I���m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I don���t know what I think until I write it down.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. 

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Fiction is a pack of lies that masquerades as truth. Don���t risk spoiling your carefully crafted lies with too much truth ��� or with too little.

Readers don���t want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions. . . . Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face down unimaginable terrors, to solve impossible puzzles, to feel a lightning jolt of adrenaline.

You need three major resources to have a successful writing career: time, writing space, and money.

Everything in your story world has one of three basic meanings to each character: good, bad, or neutral.

For a novelist, being ���too emotional��� is often a good thing. The only thing you have to sell is your emotional experiences.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another.

A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.

I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.

You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music...

If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

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I���ll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.

I���ve got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands.

If you can���t write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can���t turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can���t write a story that���s got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You���ve got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life-that���s the stimulant for a story writer.

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Libraries were full of ideas���perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.

I can survive well enough on my own��� if given the proper reading material.

I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!