Great Writing Quotes by Author Ursula K. Le Guin

A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer’s job is to be its medium.

Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

…the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There’s a story that wants to be told.

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn’t know they knew.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.

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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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