“There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell what mutton tastes like.” – Somerset Maugham

“My writing is full of lives I might have led. A writer imagines what could have happened, not what really happened.” – Joyce Carol Oates

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” – Henry David Thoreau

“A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.” – W. Somerset Maugham

“I write with experiences in mind, but I don’t write about them, I write out of them.” – John Ashbery

______________

My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.