All the Writing Advice in the World

Leave home, one can never be alone enough to write. Develop a thick hide. A writer, like an athlete, must ‘train’ every day. Always carry a notebook.  The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. Write Drunk, edit sober.  Fear is at the root of most bad writing. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ;The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination. The first draft of everything is shit.

You can’t wait for inspiration. When you can’t create you can work. Quantity creates quality. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, places, and things. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition. Omit needless words.  Write to please just one person. 

Shovel the grief onto the hero. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come.

Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

Learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad. 

The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.

Fuck literature. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice.

Paul Theroux, Harper Lee, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradury,  Susan Sontag, Will Self, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Zadie Smith, Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Jack Kerouac, Lester Dent,  Ernest Hemingway, E.B. White, Stephen King, William Faulkner, Richard Wright. Jack London. Doris Lessing. Carl Hiaasen, Frank McCourt