"Wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words—so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that."

"Your mother is not reading what you have written. These words are your private preserve until the day they’re published."

"Some of the criticism may be accurate; some might be completely off. But no matter what anyone says, it will not be your own idea, so you will have to keep those external notions at bay."

"A novel is a pedestrian work about the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints."

"This would-be novelist has betrayed herself in order that she not tell the story that has been clawing its way out from her core. She would rather not commit herself to the truth that she has found in the rigor of writing every day. This form of restraint is common and wholly unnecessary."

"Another source of restraint for the writer is the use of personal confession and the subsequent guilt that often arises from it."

"Your novel lies in your heart; it is a book about today, no matter in which era it is set, written for a contemporary audience to express a story that could only have come from you."

"You will not become a writer by aping the tones and phrases, form and content, of great books of the past."

"Our social moorings aren't the only things that restrain our creative impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon."

"Language and song are mingled in human history. To speak, to sing, is our heritage. Poets know that poems are songs, but few of us realize that novels are too." (musician)

"Many writers, and teachers of writing, spend so much time comparing work to past masters that they lose the contemporary voice of the novel being created on this day."

"If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life."

"Writing a novel is not nearly as difficult as some people would make it out to be."

"The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day."  

"The dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind—a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel."

 This Year You Write Your Novel

"At this moment in my career, after publishing twenty-seven books and at least as many short stories, I still get rejected on a regular basis. Recently I wrote a story that every major magazine rejected. After going to the major presses, I went to the smaller ones. Nobody will publish it—nobody. So don't despair—accepting rejection is part of the job description."

"If you skip a day or more between your writing sessions, your mind will drift away from these deep moments of your story. You will find that you'll have to slog back to a place that would have been easily attained if only you wrote every day."

"The connections, moods, metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words."

"The most important thing I've found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity. What do I mean by this? I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind)."

"The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day. ... There are two reasons for this rule: getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind."

"I write three hours every morning. It's the first thing I do, Monday through Sunday, fifty-two weeks a year. Some days I miss but rarely does this happen more than once a month. Writing is a serious enterprise that takes a certain amount of constancy and rigor."

"You may have spent only an hour and a half working on the book, but the rest of the day will be rife with motive moments in your unconsciousness—moments in your mind, which will be mulling over the places your words have touched. While you sleep, mountains are moving deep within your psyche. When you wake up and return to the book, you will be amazed by the realization that you are further along than when you left off yesterday."