If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.
Richard Rhodes
I have been writing a long time and have learned some things, not only from my own long hard work, but from a writing class I had for three years. In this class were all kinds of people: prosperous and poor, stenographers, housewives, salesmen, cultivated people and little servant girls who had never been to high school, timid people and bold ones, slow and quick ones.
This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.
Brenda Ueland
Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
William Zinsser
Beware of cleverness; think of nothing but greatness. Make up your mind to write the greatest short stories in the world, and do not permit yourself even to dream that you cannot write them.
Edwin Arlington Robinson,
IN A LETTER TO Edith Brower (1897)
The first question for the young writer to ask himself is: “Have I things in my head which I need to set forth, or do I merely want to be a writer?” Another way of putting it is, “Do I want to write—or to have written?” The ambition to be known as a writer is not in itself unworthy, but it requires a deliberate search for likely subjects and a strong effort of thought and will to turn them into copy.
For a born writer the effort is altogether different. It is merely to choose from an abundance of ideas those which he thinks he is fit to handle—fit, that is, by reason of study, experience, and literary skill. This last element is getting scarcer, it would seem, so that readers have to get cleverer at guessing riddles. Hence practicing to write well and finally writing well will repay. Editors and publishers will seek you out, the public will be carried away with love and gratitude.
Jacques Barzun
Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.
Maxwell Perkins,
IN A LETTER TO Nancy Hale (1937)
A note: despair at the badness of the book; can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord know the truth.
Virginia Woolf
THE BEST ADVICE on writing I ever received was: Invent your confidence. When you’re trying something new, insecurity and stage fright come with the territory. Many wonderful writers (and other artists) have been plagued by insecurity throughout their professional lives. How could it be otherwise? By its nature, art involves risk. It’s not easy, but sometimes one has to invent one’s confidence.
My own best advice to young writers is: follow your curiosity and passion. What fascinates you will probably fascinate others. But, even if it doesn’t, you will have devoted your life to what you love. An important corollary is that it’s no use trying to write like someone else. Discover what’s uniquely yours.
Diane Ackerman
Keep going. Writing is finally play, and there’s no reason why you should get paid for playing. If you’re a real writer, you’ll write no matter what.
Irwin Shaw
Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E. L. Doctorow
You have to assume that the act of writing is the most important of all. If you start worrying about people’s feelings, then you get nowhere at all.
Norman Mailer
Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Every human being has exactly the same amount of time, and yet consider the output of Robert Louis Stevenson, John Peabody Harrington, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, William Goldman, Neil Simon, Joyce Carol Oates, Agatha Christie, and John Gardner. How did they accomplish what they have? They weren’t deflected from their priorities by activities of lesser importance. The work continues, even though everything else may have to give. They know that their greatest resource is themselves. Wasting time is wasting themselves. When people ask them, “Where do you find the time?” they wonder, “Where do you lose it?”
Kenneth Atchity
WHEN I WAS doing short magazine pieces and screenplays, I feared undertaking anything as formidable as a book. One day, while I was collaborating with novelist Jerome Weidman on a screenplay for a studio, Weidman advised me how to overcome my fear. “Think about writing one page, merely one page, every day. At the end of 365 days, the end of a year, you have 365 pages. And you know what you have? You have a full-length book.”
Irving Wallace
Be persistent. Editors change; editorial tastes change; markets change. Too many beginning writers give up too easily.
John Jakes
There’s no substitute for persistence. It took me four years of clerk and copy boy’s work before I caught a break. Also, a vow of poverty helps.
Phil Mushnick
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
Ernest Hemingway
One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
Annie Dillard
Sometimes people say to me, “I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents,” and so on.
I say to them, “There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week.”
Natalie Goldberg
I have never understood why “hard work” is supposed to be pitiable. True, some work is soul destroying when it is done against the grain, but when it is part of “making,” how can you grudge it? You get tired, of course, but the struggle, the challenge, the feeling of being extended as you never thought you could be is fulfilling and deeply, deeply satisfying.
Rumer Godden
Don’t market yourself. Editors and readers don’t know what they want until they see it. Scratch what itches. Write what you need to write, feed the hunger for meaning in your life. Play at the serious questions of life and death.
Donald M. Murray
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
No one put a gun to your head and ordered you to become a writer. One writes out of his own choice and must be prepared to take the rough spots along the road with a certain equanimity, though allowed some grinding of the teeth.
Stanley Ellin
Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance. People with good judgment weigh the assurance of a comfortable living represented by the mariners’ certificates that declare them masters of all ships, whether steam or sail, and masters of all oceans and all navigable rivers, and do not forsake such work in order to learn English and write books signed Joseph Conrad. People who have had hard lives but somehow found themselves fetched up in executive positions with prosperous West Coast oil firms do not drink and wench themselves out of such comfy billets in order in their middle age to write books as Raymond Chandler; that would be poor judgment. No one on the payroll of a New York newspaper would get drunk and chuck it all to become a free-lance writer, so there was no John O’Hara. When you have at last progressed to the junction that enforces the decision of whether to proceed further, by sending your stuff out, and refusing to remain a wistful urchin too afraid to beg, and you have sent the stuff, it is time to pause and rejoice.
George V. Higgins
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency … to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner
I don’t preach patience to you, but cynicism; it is the most comforting of philosophies. You will get over your present difficulties only to run into something worse, and so on until the last sad scene. Make up your mind to it—and then make the best of it. That is, do the best you can within the limits of your chance. If you can’t write a book a year, then write one every two years.
H. L. Mencken,
IN A LETTER TO HIS FUTURE WIFE,
Sara Powell Haardt
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Jack Kerouac
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.
Natalie Goldberg
To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.
You must write every single day of your life.
You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.
You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.
I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.
May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise.
Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Ray Bradbury
Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Rejections don’t really hurt after you stop bleeding, and even a rejection serves to introduce the writer’s name to an editor, particularly if a rejected story is competently written.
Isaac Asimov
Just get it down on paper, and then we’ll see what to do about it.
Maxwell Perkins
Type. Your job is to get it on paper. Ours is to decide if it’s any good. Just keep typing.
Robert Gottlieb
The most solid advice … for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
William Saroyan
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot
Advice to Aspiring Writers 
From Jeffrey A. Carver’s Web Page
Many people have e-mailed me asking what advice I might offer to an aspiring writer. Here are a few thoughts. A lot more could be said, obviously, but I hope you’ll find the following useful:
• Read, read, read. Read widely and voraciously. Since you’re looking at my web page, you probably have an interest in science fiction or fantasy (SF/F). Seek out the best in the field. (Look for my recommended reading list but only as a start; it doesn’t even pretend to be exhaustive.) Read the classics, both SF and other. I wish I’d read more of the non-SF classics when I was in school.
• Practice, practice, practice writing. Writing is a craft that requires both talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong. Short stories are a good training ground and an easier market to break into.
• If you’re wondering about a course to pursue in college, and you think you want a career in writing, choose the school that you think will give you the best all-around experience. Much of what I learned in college I learned outside the classroom. Study what interests you (though it doesn’t hurt to get some training for work that pays a salary!). What do you feel passionate about? Pursue it! You don’t need a certificate to write; you do need self-discipline and inner fire.
• Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.
• Don’t plan on making a lot of money from your writing. A survey by the Authors’ Guild a few years ago found that the average author earned about $4,000 a year from his or her writing. That was a general survey, but even in the genres, there are plenty of people struggling—many of them quite good writers. If you make it into print, you are doing well. If you succeed in breaking out commercially, you will be among the fortunate few.
• Seek out constructive feedback on your work. Take suggestions seriously, and learn from them. Not all criticisms will be on the mark, but even those that aren’t can help you spot problems that need attention. You must decide for yourself which suggestions to take, and which to leave. Writing workshops can be invaluable—not just to the aspiring writer but also to the working professional. I have belonged to a local writing group for over fifteen years, and they critique every piece of work I do before it goes to a publisher. My writing is far better for it. There are numerous online workshops available, both on the Internet and on the big commercial services. See my recommended reading list for a guidebook to writing workshops.
• Don’t send me your manuscripts. I can’t read them. I’m not an editor, and I’m busy trying to earn a living myself. Nor can I find you an agent or a publisher. You’ve got to do your own legwork. I know how hard it is, but there’s just no other way.
• Seek out good sources of information. There are many fine books on writing, some of them general and some specifically oriented toward writing SF/F. The SFFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) web page has links to numerous writer-friendly resources on the net. There’s a link to the SFFWA page at the bottom of my home page. Your library has many resources as well. Ask to see The Literary Marketplace, which lists both publishers and agents.
• Be determined, and be thick-skinned. I collected rejection slips for six years before I finally sold my first short story. Why did I keep going? Was I crazy? Probably. I was convinced I could do it, and I refused to take no for an answer.
• Once you decide you’re ready to begin submitting to publishers, I suggest the following rule: Always have the next market in mind. If your story comes back with a rejection note, don’t take it personally or stew about it. GET IT IN THE MAIL TO ANOTHER MARKET THAT SAME DAY. (Then you can go back to whatever it is you were doing, preferably writing the next story.)
Good luck, and I look forward to seeing your work in print!