Five Great Quotations about the Writing Process

“There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.” – E.B. White

“…almost every author have gone through the terribly uncomfortable period between the time of shedding the seeds of a story and waiting to see it flourish as a published book, spending hours watering and fertilizing it. This is a dreadful period, frustrating and depressing.” – Ama H. Vanniarachchy

“Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.” – Samuel Beckett

“Writing a book is a blood sport. If it doesn’t hurt when you’re done, you’re probably doing something wrong.” – Kevis Hendrickson

• Follow a “process” when writing your story

• The “thinking step” when writing your book

• Drafting: Write on paper or type on computer? 

• Draft rarely perfect after first go-round
After you’ve brainstormed some ideas and made an outline of how you might organize those thoughts into a story or nonfiction piece, the next step is get busy “drafting.”

• A finished draft beats a perfect draft

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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 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 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.

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