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There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

Frank Herbert

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Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

Stephen King

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The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

William Gass

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You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Jack London

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This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

Neil Gaiman

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The first draft of anything is sh*t.

Ernest Hemingway

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The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Stephen King

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No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Robert Frost

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Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.

Lloyd Alexander

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If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

Toni Morrison

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I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Douglas Adams

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Déjà vu appears frequently in my story and I'm afraid it might be too similar to flashbacks. Should I change it? If not, do you have any tips for writing about déjà vu?

Deja vu and flashbacks are not the same thing. One of them is a vivid memory and the other is just a feeling of something having happened before. The latter takes place in the present for your characters whereas flashbacks take on a whole section of their own to illustrate the past.

Writing deja vu can be tricky because you need to let the readers know that your character is experiencing this. The quickest way is to just say that your character is experiencing it, usually through dialogue, but if you don’t want to outright say it or if you’re writing in a fictional world, you have to come up with ways to show it.

However, what you do depends on whether what your character is experiencing actually happened and beyond that whether the event happened during or prior to the story is also important.

Here are some tips for deja vu:

People and Place: The setting and the people there, including the time of day, what position people are in, where exactly they are, the weather, etc., are strangely familiar.

Dialogue and Action: The dialogue and the action is also familiar and your character may have a feeling of “I knew you were going to say that”, BUT we can’t predict what will happen next when we’re experiencing deja vu. The sense of familiarity comes about as things happen.

Brevity: Deja vu is short. Really short. Flashbacks can be much longer.

Actual Memory or No?: Did what your character remembers during deja vu actually happen? Is this significant to the story? If this happened within the story, the reader should recognize the deja vu. If it happened prior to the story, you have to let the readers know your character is experiencing deja vu.

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Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow

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When you get some free time, write. When you get some lazy time, plan. When you get down time, world build. When your time comes, shine!

Ace Antonio Hall (via writersrelief)

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Bild über We Heart It #big #books #bookshelves #heaven #house #library #tan - https://weheartit.com/entry/143408079/via/25578149

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The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.

Abraham B. Yehoshua