As I try to get back on track with daily writing (after failing to complete 100 Days), I am inspired by the words of other writers whose work I admire.

Write all the time, hone your voice, and make sure that you have a way of saying something that is yours and yours alone. Find a way to stand out. Be funny and be different. Live a life that gives you lots of stories. Love and laugh and make friends and get your heart broken and have stuff be messy and weird and sometimes too extreme. But make sure you write about it. Figure out how you feel about it. Write constantly, and be brave with your words.

— Pamela Ribon, Your Parents Will Never Wish You This Life

I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me, the bad beginning is just something to build on. It’s no big deal. You have to give yourself permission to do that because you can’t expect to write regularly and always write well. That’s when people get into the habit of waiting for the good moments, and that is where I think writer’s block comes from. Like: It’s not happening. Well, maybe good writing isn’t happening, but let some bad writing happen. Let it happen!

— Jennifer Egan, The Days of Yore interview

Writers are thieves. We steal moments and memories and now we steal minutes, too. We scramble for extra seconds and shove them in our pockets when no one is looking. If you want to write, you make it work. You make time. There’s really no other way.

— Tahereh Mafi, Stealing Time to Make a Schedule

Finding your voice, finding courage, finding time…these are common struggles for me. Where do you find inspiration for writing?

[P]ublishing, while far from dead, has not moved in one great big step from the world of ink and trees to that of pixels and tablets. Many small, sometimes halting, sometimes diverging paths are being followed, more or less simultaneously and with fascinating results. Digital publishing, it turns out, isn’t so much a second print run (as it seemed at first) as a whole other ecosystem, with a unique atmosphere, strange new rain patterns, and its own troubling signs of pollution and climate change. Diving into it means learning how to breathe all over again.

— Mandy Brown, Three

Further reading: The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane

[…] the question is whether the image of the word-obsessed editor poring over a manuscript, red pen in hand, has given way to that of the whizz-bang entrepreneur attuned to the market’s latest caprice, more at home with a tweet than a metaphor.

— Alex Clark, The lost art of editing

Further reading: Semi-collected thoughts on editing

Literary culture isn’t a temple, it’s an ecosystem. Writers can be readers, readers can be critics, critics can be writers, audiences can have a voice.”

—Carolyn Kellogg, 12 reasons to ignore the naysayers: Do NaNoWriMo

The book is alive. The book is paper, it’s print, it’s digital, it’s online, it’s on your phone, it’s in your purse, it’s under your pillow. The book is everywhere. The book is changing. What will we design next? We’ll keep designing the book, we’ll keep reinventing what it is, find new ways to read, new ways to write, new ways to publish, new ways to spread information.”

— Ellen Lupton, Thirty Conversations on Design

via @_mkimball

Put the words down, don’t obsess over them, just effusively spill them down onto the page. Then step away—for an hour, a day, a week, whatever you need. And then edit. Edit like crazy. Be hard on words and yourself and make it better. And when you think you’re finished, edit it one more time.”

— Larry Smith, The Happiness Project interview

We can try to put a protective layer of glass on the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text?”

— Steven Johnson, The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book, a Hearst New Media lecture given at Columbia University

If it exploded in my mind and something came to me, I wrote it. I never thought about it. I don’t believe in thinking about stories; I believe in doing them. . . . Everything I do is passionate. . . . It’s all from the heart. All my stories are me.”

— Ray Bradbury, Tales from Inner Space interview

Poor writing often is a simple form of obfuscation, and copy editors beat the drum for clear writing. Everyone benefits when we understand each other.”

– Mark Allen, Editors fight the good fight for clear communication

I don’t know what bookstore I was in when I first came across the illustrated version of The Elements of Style, but I know I was with Pam, and I know I dragged her over to the display so I could show her the artwork inside.

So I was thrilled to read The 99 Percent’s interview with the talent behind all that loveliness, Maira Kalman. In “The Pursuit of Happiness”, Kalman talks about how she became an artist, what inspires her, and her latest project. But I especially love what she has to say about the art of storytelling in relation to her illustrations:

I think everything I do is narrative, but it’s not just a story, it’s a movie – a movie of my life. And usually I’m trying to put too much information in one image. But because I thought that I would be a writer, and that’s how I started out – as a writer and not as an artist – then when I decided to start drawing, it was going to be narrative. It’s things that are from my life, and things I’ve seen, and things I’ve seen in books. It’s always telling stories.”