Showcase Shares Reflections on the Writer’s Life with California Writers
This time we’ve looked back into the observations of renowned California for their thoughts about our very challenging profession. Comments range from humorous to bleak to, happily, energizing. Here’s what we discovered:
Ray Bradbury
“Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”
“You fail only if you stop writing.”
George Burns
“I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.”
Raymond Chandler
“Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.”
“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
Didion, Joan (1934- )
“Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”
Erle Stanley Gardner
“The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing. In the course of six years of more or less intensive study, I’ve seen every rule laid down by a prominent author contradicted by some other equally prominent author.”
Zane Grey
“Recipe For Greatness – To bear up under loss; To fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; To be victor over anger; To smile when tears are close; To resist disease and evil men and base instincts; To hate hate and to love love; To go on when it would seen good to die; To look up with unquenchable faith in something ever more about to be. That is what any man can do, and be great.”
Ross MacDonald
“We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.”
Will Rogers
“There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.”