Writing Workshop Quotes

• A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

  Richard Bach

  Perseverance, Writing, Editing

  Richard Bach (2012). “A Gift of Wings”, p.9, Dell

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• Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

  William Wordsworth

  Life, Beauty, Beautiful

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Ernest De Selincourt, Alan G. Hill, Chester Linn Shaver (1967). “The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Volume VIII. A Supplement of New Letters”, p.51, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Read a ton. Take a workshop course so you learn to give and get criticism.

  Jodi Picoult

  Giving, Criticism, Workshops

  Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. September 2, 2008.

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• I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

  Tobias Wolff

  Inspirational, Funny, Graduation

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• When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Powerful, Writing, Character

  Ernest Hemingway (2002). “Death in the Afternoon”, p.153, Simon and Schuster

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• I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.

  Bharati Mukherjee

  Father, Home, Writing

  "American Dreamer". www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

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• I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

  Justin Cronin

  Writing, Iowa, Fiction

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• The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, People, Worry

  "Talking in Our Pajamas". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. Summer, 2008.

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• I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

  Dennis Lehane

  Writing, Bars, Use

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• You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

  Tobias Wolff

  Writing, Information, Teach

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• I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.

  Vikas Swarup

  Writing, Imagination, Creative

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• I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.

  Kate Zambreno

  Philosophy, Writing, Thinking

  "The naming is a political act, the writing is a political act, a revolt against disappearance". Interview With Noah Charney, logger.believermag.com. November 3, 2014.

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• Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Class, Focus

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.253, Shambhala Publications

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• My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table. I think that's a mistake, in obvious opposition to the ideal of teaching which permits a student to be someone other than the teacher. ... The successful teacher has to make each of the students a different product rather than the same.

  Nicholas Delbanco

  Teacher, Mistake, Teaching

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• A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

  Rachel Cusk

  Writing, Ambition, Creative

  "Rachel Cusk: in praise of the creative writing course" by Rachel Cusk, www.theguardian.com. January 18, 2013.

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• The comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, Mixing, Different

  "Talking in Our Pajamas". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. Summer, 2008.

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• When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Writing, Worry, People

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you're an author, you can tell whether you're really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog.

  Max Barry

  Sex, Writing, Character

  "Hand Me My Y-Chromosome". Personal blog, maxbarry.com. August 08, 2005.

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• I'm a total ho for any writing workshop, any technique from anyone.

  Travis Morrison

  Writing, Technique, Workshops

  "The Dismemberment Plan". Interview with Lindsay Zoladz, pitchfork.com. June 27, 2013.

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• If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.

  Judith Barrington

  Fall, Teaching, Writing

  Judith Barrington (2002). “Writing the Memoir”

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• I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.

  Amanda Hocking

  Taken, Writing, School

  "Meet Mega Bestselling Indie Heroine Amanda Hocking". Interview with Tonya Plank, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 5, 2011.

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