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1 " Advice to friends. Advice to fellow mothers in the same boat. " How do you do it all?" Crack a joke. Make it seem easy. Make everything seem easy. Make life seem easy and parenthood and marriage and freelancing for pennies, writing a novel and smiling after a rejection, keeping the faith after two, reminding oneself that four years of work counted for a lot, counted for everything. Make the bed. Make it nice. Make the people laugh when you sit down to write and if you can't make them laugh make them cry. Make them want to hug you or hold you or punch you in the face. Make them want to kill you or fuck you or be your friend. Make them change. Make them happy. Make the baby smile. Make him laugh. Make him dinner. Make him proud.Hold the phone, someone is on the other line. She says its important. People are dying. Children. Friends. Press mute because there is nothing you can say. Press off because you're running out of minutes. Running out of time. Soon he'll be grown up and you'll regret the time you spent pushing him away for one more paragraph in the manuscript no one will ever read. Put down the book, the computer, the ideas. Remember who you are now. Wait. Remember who you were. Wait. Remember what's important. Make a list. Ten things, no twenty. Twenty thousand things you want to do before you die but what if tomorrow never comes? No one will remember. No one will know. No one will laugh or cry or make the bed. No one will have a clue which songs to sing to the baby. No one will be there for the children. No one will finish the first draft of the novel. No one will publish the one that's been finished for months. No one will remember the thought you had last night, that great idea you forgot to write down. "
2 " Olivier took a deep breath, then turned and bowed in farewell. Gersonides nodded in return, then thought of something." The manuscript you brought me, by that bishop. It argues that understanding is more important than movement. That action is virtuous only if it reflects pure comprehension, and that virtue comes from the comprehension, not the action." Olivier frowned. " So?" " Dear boy, I must tell you a secret." " What?" " I do believe it is wrong. "
3 " Knowledge and book learning are not wisdom," said the captain." Is this book wisdom?" asked Lucy, putting the manuscript back on the table." It has some elements of wisdom in it, me dear," replied the captain. " I did not lead a very wise life myself but it was a full one and a grown-up one. You come to age very often through shipwreck and disaster, and at the heart of the whirlpool some men find God. "
4 " What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish. "
― Thomas Wolfe
5 " A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. "
― Ring Lardner
6 " From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: " There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot. "
7 " Turning a manuscript into a book is easy getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard. "
8 " I was greeted by the Ulmers’ eleven-year-old daughter, a girl of remarkable poise. Mrs. Ulmer was busily typing a manuscript that needed to make the evening mail and after welcoming me, in a very friendly manner, she returned to work. There were two other children and Mr. Ulmer, who was writing the manuscript just as his wife was typing it. The youngest child, who could have been no more than five or six, had the task of relaying the handwritten pages from his father to his eldest sister, who would quickly scan them for errors, and from her to his mother. The middle child, a little girl of seven or eight, lay on the floor with a large dictionary and would look up words when called upon by her parents or sister. "
― Robert Bruce Stewart , The Birth of M.E. Meegs (Emmie Reese Mysteries, #1)
9 " Childhood memories surge back more vividly midway through life – like some palimpsest whose original text suddenly reappears after the manuscript has been chemically treated. "
― Gérard de Nerval , Selected Writings
10 " Introduction to Kate. - Satisfied she had concluded her notes on the manuscript she had been reading, Kate placed her heel back in its shoe and stood up. She smoothed her skirt and paused to spare a thought for Vincent. “What is going to happen next?” Kate remembered him pleading. Claire had said this would happen. "
― Francine Scott , Coming First (The Woman First Chronicles Book 1)
11 " But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story. "
― Katharine Weber , The Music Lesson
12 " Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what’s to come, and it’s enough; I have faith in what I can’t see and it’s substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it’s an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters.Simply put, I’m in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought.The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky. "
― Chila Woychik ,
13 " Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is. "
― , Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know about What Editors Do
14 " I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time. "
― Jane Yolen