Category Archives: Writer's Circle
The editor of a magazine of general circulation. On the generally accepted assumption that each sold copy of a popular magazine eventually reaches an average of five persons, there is one forum in the magazine world of America which every week assembles a throng of ten million or more assorted citizens, gathered from everywhere, coast [...]
Confidence comes with experience, and when you no longer have any grave fears about your ability to make a living at the trade, your mind turns from elementary problems to the less distracting task of finding out how to make your discovered degree of talent count for all that it may be worth. After trying [...]
Journalists so clumsy that, in the graphic phrase of a short grass poet, “they seem to write with their feet,” sell manuscripts with clock-like regularity to first-class markets. The magazines, like the newspapers, employ “re-write men” to take crude manuscripts to pieces, rebuild them and give them a presentable polish. The matter of prime importance [...]
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. - W. H. Auden
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one. - Paul Auster
The book is your book. You have been [...]
Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements. - Samuel Johnson
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer [...]
If you have a real “story” up your sleeve and know how to word it in passable English, the next thing to learn is the way to prepare a manuscript in professional form for marketing.
Good form dictates that the first page of your contribution should bear in the upper left hand corner of the sheet [...]
An article for a magazine differs chiefly from a newspaper story in that the magazine must make a wider appeal–to a national rather than to a local interest. The successful magazine writer is simply a reporter who knows what the general public likes to read, and who has learned when and where and how to [...]
A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there, that of the pulse, the [...]
The pen is mightier than the sword. - Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
Writers are the main landmarks of the past. - Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them. - Samuel Butler
If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of [...]
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. - Virginia Woolf
Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment [...]
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