Literary Birthday - 19 May

Happy Birthday, Nora Ephron, born 19 May 1941, died 26 June 2012

10 Quotes

1. Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
2. The hardest thing about writing is writing.
3. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
4. I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.
5. I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
6. If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
7. Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
8. I don’t have much of a routine. I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don’t do anything. I just sort of have lunch—all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.
9. First of all, whatever you do, work in a field that has something to do with writing or publishing. So you will be exposed to what people are writing about and how they are writing, and as important, so you will be exposed to people in the business who will get to know you and will call on you if they are looking for someone for a job.
10. Secondly, you have to write. And if you don’t have a job doing it, then you have to sit at home doing it.

Ephron was an American journalist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, producer, director, and blogger. She is best known for her romantic comedies and was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay): for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally…, and Sleepless in Seattle. 

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 19 May

Happy Birthday, Jodi Picoult, born 19 May 1966

Jodi Picoult’s Top Three Writing Tips

1. Read a ton. Reading will inspire you. It will also help you find out where you belong as a writer.
2. Write every day. Treat writing as a job. There is no such thing as waiting for the muse. If you want to to be taken seriously as a writer, take writing seriously.
3. Do not stop in the middle of your first book. Finish it. No matter what. All writers go through this. It’s more of a fear of not being good enough that makes you stop. You think, ‘What if I’m not as good as I thought I was?’ Do not allow it to stop you. If you don’t finish that first book you’re making life difficult for yourself.

To read more about Jodi Picoult’s writing routine, the best book she’s written, and her thoughts on Hollywood, follow this link

Picoult is the best-selling author of 18 novels, including My Sister’s Keeper and Sing Me Home. Her last five novels have debuted at number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Where Writers Write - Hilary Mantel

Literary Birthday - 18 May

Happy Birthday, Lionel Shriver, born 18 May 1957

Seven Lionel Shriver Quotes

1. I gather that the number of readers in this country is going down, while the number of people who aspire to write is going up. The best thing you can do as a would-be writer is to read other people’s work — and as an ironclad rule of thumb, never write anything that you wouldn’t want to read yourself.
2. I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce ‘flaccid’ as ‘flaksid,’ which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct and annoys one and all. I never let people get away with using ‘enervated‘ to mean ‘energized,‘ when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between ‘like’ and ‘as,‘ but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, ‘You mean, as I said.’ Or, ‘You mean, you gave it to whom,’ or ‘You mean, that’s just between you and me. ’ I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so –- obviously — have no friends
3. Fiction writers don’t write about money enough.
4. Rituals — fixing cups of coffee, paring fingernails, and all manner of variations on staring blankly out the window — are all forms of delay, and therefore don’t constitute magical evocations of one’s muse, but distraction. Writing is fundamentally dull, and there are no real secrets to it: You sit down, you type something out, most of the time if you have any self-respect you throw it away. My desk? Is usually towering with huge piles of paper. This is not a mountainous topography I can promote. The piles represent everything I am ignoring — finances, magazines I think I should read but don’t really want to, and odious little tasks like filling out this very questionnaire.
5. Kevin as a phenomenon long ago ceased to have anything to do with me. I’ve published two novels since, and I’m stuck into another; fortunately, many Kevin fans have moved on to other novels of mine as well. Meanwhile, Kevin can continue to suck a lychee sadistically in front of his mother after her daughter has lost an eye without any further help from me. My starkest realisation that this novel has achieved a life of its own was while watching Ramsay’s riveting adaptation of the book.
6. I am not as nice as I look.
7. Though raised by Aldai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in New York. And I have been told more than once that I am ‘extreme’.

Shriver is an American journalist and the author of 12 novels. She is best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin. She lives in London.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 17 May

Happy Birthday, Peter Høeg, born 17 May 1957

Quotes

1. I start every day with meditation and then I write and then I meditate again and then I do the second writing stretch.
2. A novel is like a wave of tension that travels over a very long time … I think it is important not to carry with you the tension that you created in one work into the next.
3. Each new book, it’s a game for me. It’s like going to a carnival and dressing up.
4. It’s a mistake that we divide art into popular art and fine, highbrow, high-quality art.  It has no basis in reality. And it is a way to keep other people and other people’s taste at a distance. It is a way of closing oneself towards some kinds of reality.
5. I like to play with genres and to experience the thriller and the love story and to play with reality.
6. There is a day of change in the life of most authors… That is the day they go from writing poems and short stories to working on a novel and writing for several hours every day… I must have been about twenty-four or twenty-five when I reached that turning point. I’d written for years before that but had never sent anything to a publisher.
7. My first novel took four years to write, but that doesn’t say anything about the quality or the size of the novel. It was a learning piece, an apprentice book, because writing is not just a talent but a skill. It’s something you have to learn and develop. It’s a slow process. 
8. The book is the slowest art/media form. Everything else is very fast, but a book is very slow. 
9. To describe what you’ve read is like explaining music in writing.
10. There are no fearless people, only fearless moments.

Peter Hoeg, a Danish fiction writer, published his first novel, A History of Danish Dreams, in 1988 but it was Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow (1992) that earned him international literary celebrity. His books have been published in more than 30 countries.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Where Writers Write - The Brontë Sisters

This room at Haworth Parsonage, known as the dining room, the drawing room or the parlour, is where the Brontë sisters used to write and discuss their work with each other.