Friday Focus: Great hearts

Endurance is the crowning quality, and patience all the passion of great hearts. ~James Russell Lowell

Happy Friday! =)

Friday Focus: Give the audience all you've got

I've always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you've got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn't supposed to be easy.
~Henry Rollins

Friday Focus: Make mistakes

"Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong, too scared to do anything." -Neil Gaiman

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: It's not a profession

"Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life." ~Gregory McDonald

I thought this was a pretty good quote to conclude this week's WRITE FOR YOU series. =)

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: You don't need anything else

"You are a writer. Right now. With only what you have in your head as it is. You don't need anything else. You are a writer. You just need to keep writing. Don't let the Writing Fairy tell you that you aren't. That you need something more, that you're pretending to be something you're not. Hemmingway wasn't Hemmingway when he started. He was just a guy named Ernest who sat down at his typewriter."
~Joseph Devon, "The Myth of the Writing Fairy"

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: Definition of Obstacles

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

~Henry Ford

(I need this quote hung in every room of my house!)

Keep those eyes focused, my friends!!!

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: Just Write

“You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.”

~ Leonard Bernstein

I thought this was pretty appropriate considering NaNoWriMo is over!

So in the words of Lady Gaga,

just write...

gonna be okay

da da doo-doo-mmmm

(Well, they're close to her words.)

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: Your writing must have you

"There's one thing your writing must have to be any good at all. It must have you. Your soul, your self, your heart, your guts, your voice -- you must be on that page. In the end, you can't make the magic happen for your reader. You can only allow the miracle of 'being one with' to take place. So dare to be yourself. Dare to reveal yourself. Be honest, be open, be true... If you are, everything else will fall into place." ~ Elizabeth Ayres

Happy Friday, everyone! =)

Friday Focus: Follow your inspirations

"Far away in the sunshine are my highest inspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see the beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they may lead." ~Lousia May Alcott

Talk about an inspiring point of view!

Happy Friday, everyone!

Friday Focus: The way to resume

“The way to resume is to resume. It is the only way. To resume.” – Gertrude Stein

Resume: to take up or go on with again after interruption; continue

Thought this was a good one after Wednesday's post.

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: The People Who Get Up

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."

~ George Bernard Shaw

And there you go.

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus - let the beautiful stuff out

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. ~ Ray Bradbury

I love that. Let the beautiful stuff out - isn't that a great way to look at it?

Happy Friday! =)

Friday Focus: The Novelist's Ambition

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

~ Milan Kundera

Yes! Exactly!

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: Put your reader in the middle

"The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader,through his sense, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events."

~Ray Bradbury

This is a good one for fantasy writers - I think we all need this kind of reminder every now and then! =)

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: You must want to enough

"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like."

~Phyllis A. Whitney

I know I want to enough.

How about you?

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: The professional writer

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." ~ Richard Bach

See! It isn't the perfect query, the well-worded synopsis, the requests for partials filling up our email inboxes, the contests we've won. It's not quitting when the going gets tough, when the words don't come, when everything looks jumbled and nothing makes sense and we think we're crazy for doing what we're doing.

So keep going, no matter what, my writerly friends! Be a professional! =)

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus - successful writers

"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties." --- Bonnie Friedman

Whoo boy is this a good quote for me this week!

Keep on writin' my writerly friends! =)

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: Writing a book is a struggle

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one was not driven on by some demon who one can neither resist nor understand.” ~George Orwell

Yep. I am totally loving this quote. Loving it.

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: Having the guts to write

"I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all." -E.B. White

Perfect quote considering what time of year it is, don't you think? Submissions, queries, critiques... everyone's trying to get their stuff polished up and sent in, and amidst the chaos is a whole lot of frustration and disappointment. Well guess what? I'm proud of each and every one of you writers out there, because having the guts to write in the first place (and stick with it) is a wonderful thing!

Happy Friday!

Friday Focus: The muscles of writing

The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart. ~ Natalie Goldberg

I'd like to add another one to the list: faith.

Happy Friday!