Quotes on freewriting

What writers and others say

“Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task — such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping — I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.”

— Isaac Asimov, science fiction author

“Don’t sit down to write without knowing what you’re going to write.”

— Kenneth Atchity, author of A Writer’s Time

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”

— Robert Cormier, American author, columnist and reporter

“I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health.”

— Noel Coward, English actor, playwright and composer

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining … researching … talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

— E.L. Doctorow, author of Ragtime and other critically acclaimed novels

“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”

– William Faulkner, American writer and Nobel Prize laureate

“Too many of us wait to do the perfect thing, with the result we do nothing.”

— William Feather, American publisher

“The way I start writing is always the same. I sit down at my typewriter and start typing. I start to babble, sometimes starting in the middle of the story and usually fairly quickly I see how it’s going to start. It just starts shaping itself.”

— Cynthia Gorney, writer for The New Yorker

“Notes are like Velcro. As you try to skim them, they ensnare you, and pretty soon you can’t see the story for the details. The story is not in my notes. The story is in my head.”

— Jane Harrigan, professor at the University of New Hampshire and author of The Editorial Eye

“Roy Peter Clark … divides writers into ‘planners’ and ‘plungers.’ Roy’s a plunger. So sometimes he just jumps into a topic and starts writing whatever comes to mind. He calls that first round of writing a ‘vomit draft.’”

— Jack Hart, managing editor of the Oregonian, and author of A Writer’s Coach

“Apply the seat of your pants to the seat of a chair” and write.

— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, on his first rule for writers

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist

“I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist

“A radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My reply — ‘One word at a time’ — seemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasn’t.”

— Stephen King, prolific novelist, in On Writing

“SHITTY FIRST DRAFT.”

— Annie Lamott, author of Bird by Bird, on what she types on the top of the page to relieve blank-page anxiety

“You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place — you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.”

— Bernard Malamud, author of The Natural and other novels

“One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.”

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude

“I believe in writing your way to the end. Write a sloppy first draft so you can see the shape of the thing. All you ask of the second draft is that it be better than the first.”

— James Magnuson, novelist, playwright and TV writer

“I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.”

— Don Marquis, American humorist, journalist and author

“There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

— H.L. Menchen, American journalist, essayist, magazine editor and satirist

“It is important to maintain the voice and flow of the story. The best way to do this is to interrupt your draft when you know what is coming next, what you are saying, and how it may be said. That way, when you sit back down to write, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off.”

— Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, in Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work

“Put your notes aside and write the first draft from memory. Follow the instinctive flow of the story so that you can make unexpected connections as well as expected ones. Check your notes afterward for accuracy, but you will find that what you forget probably is best forgotten, and what you remembered in the flow of writing is what needs to be remembered.”

— Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, in Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

― Jodi Picoult, American writer

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

― Terry Pratchett, English author

”We make a mistake when we’re younger. We feel compelled to hit a home run in the very first sentence. So we spend a lot of time staring at the typewriter. I’ll settle for a quiet single, or even a long foul, anything that gets me started.”

— Saul Pett, reporter and writer for The Associated Press

“If writing a book is impossible, write a chapter. If writing a chapter is impossible, write a page. If writing a page is impossible, write a paragraph. If writing a paragraph is impossible, write a sentence. If writing a sentence is impossible, write a word and teach yourself everything there is to know about that word and then write another, connected word and see where the connection leads.”

— Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“Write your first draft with you heart. Rewrite with your head.”

– Mike Rich, American screenwriter

“I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive.”

— Philip Roth, American novelist

“Don’t fight it, write it.”

— Chip Scanlan, senior faculty-writing, The Poynter Institute,
on the note he taped to his old IBM Selectric typewriter

“At this point I’m striving for velocity to race past the critical ‘you suck’ voice in my head that can bog me down. … Whatever I produce in that first burst of writing becomes my first draft (there are writers who call it their ‘zero draft,’ an approach that allows them to be even less demanding) when I hit the print button.”

— Chip Scanlan, senior faculty-writing, The Poynter Institute

“Leave the judging ’til later.”

— Chip Scanlan, senior faculty-writing, The Poynter Institute, on the note he taped to his computer

“The things that I have written fastest have always pleased the most.”

— Lord Chesterfield, aka Phillip Stanhope, British statesman and man of letters

“I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.”

— John Steinbeck, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Grapes of Wrath

“I wrote another five hundred words. Can I have another cookie?”

— Writer to his wife in a Mick Stevens cartoon for The New Yorker

“You do it wrong first.”

— Dick Todd, former senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, on how to write right