thoughts on writing

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” 
― William Faulkner

"I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have. It's the only way of learning how to write a story.” 

– John Green 

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

― Stephen King

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

― Ray Bradbury

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

— Stephen King

“The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.”
— Stephen King

To be a writer, you must read.  I adore reading, and I simply do not do enough of it.  But in reading most recently a Stephen King novel (who by coincidence I just quoted more than anyone else) – I realized sometimes reading is inspirational, and every so often, it is not. 

Please reader, do not get me wrong.  It was not because his writing was not inspired or fantastic.  It was simply because it was … too good.  I read his words and thought, “I can never write like this.”  They say write about things you know.  He wrote about things with such knowledge that I can’t even imagine knowing.  If I am writing about a chef, do I need to know how to cook?  A musician, to play an instrument?  Considering this, I am a master of nothing.  My knowledge has very concrete limits.  But then again – was JK Rowling a teacher at a very famous school of wizardry?