These perspectives apply to far more than NaNoWriMo, but they just might give a needed push to those of you trying to get a novel written within this month.
- “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett
- “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway
- “If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” – Dan Poynter
- “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” – Natalie Goldberg
- “On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut – it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.” – Stephen King
- “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” – Joshua Wolf Shenk
- “Write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them – without a thought about publication – and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” – Anne Tyler
- “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou
- “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams
- “In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” – Rose Tremain
Jnana's Red Barn 