The Typing Type

List of Cliches

Novel Construction 101

“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”

Five Ways to Re-Energize Out of a Writing Slump

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”

“It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.”

The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?" And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!

15 Unusual Words that Make Writers Swoon

I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.

“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.”

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

“Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.”

"Never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story."

"You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block."

"Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year."

6 Words for Love (in Ancient Greek)

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."