Quotes on writing

I've been collecting quotes on writing by various authors and thought I'd share some:

Ernest Hemingway: "My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it."

Rudyard Kipling: "Words are the most powerful drugs used by mankind."

C.S. Lewis: "Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

Eudora Welty: "Write about what you don't know about what you know."

Maya Angelou: "There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth."

Truman Capote: "To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make."

Always a student

In taking a www.newsu.org online course, I've realized how little I know about writing.

Some of the lessons are obvious: Place subject and verbs at the beginning of a sentence. Use strong, or active, verbs.

But some lessons I forgot or just don't apply. There's a difference, for example, in using strong quotes and in using dialogue. I'm big on using strong quotes - tell reporters all the time to move a good quote to the top of the story.

But implying dialogue between the story subjects makes a huge difference. The example instructor Roy Peter Clark gives is from an article about a plane and helicopter colliding over a school. "It looked like two planes were fighting, Mom," Mark Kessler, 6 of Wynnewood, told his mother, Gail, after she raced to the school.

He's not just giving a direct quote to the reporter. The reporter reflects the conversation Mark is having with his mother. By using dialogue instead of just a direct quote, the reporter puts the reader at the scene.

That's just one of many lessons I've gained so far from the course, but I plan to go back and revisit it several times.

Learning from Hemingway

I'm reading "A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway, who is able to give such detail with so few words. He says Ezra Pound taught him not to use adjectives.
The vignettes of his early life in 1920s Paris include conversations with those who thought his writing too lean, too stark. He didn't apologize.
As many writers know, it's harder to be brief than to write too long. There's a scene in the film "A River Runs Through It," where Norman gets English lessons from his minister father. Each time he turns his essay in, the father marks through several words, hands it back to him and says to shorten it. After several revisions, the writing is down to less than half a page. Then Norman goes fishing.
The easiest way to make writing more concise is to omit needless words. But, what next?
In today's instant messaging world where sound bites become the news and people don't always take time to read the whole article, it's important to get the message across quickly. The trick is learning to do that. Reading Hemingway seems like a good start.