Recent content by Paul Whybrow

“I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.” Libba Bray

"Without commitment, you’ll never start. Without consistency, you’ll never finish." Denzel Washington

'Write without ambition, without aim, inhibition, judgement or censure. Embrace words that are misshapen and misspelt. The key is to not to stop to think.” Jacqueline Crooks

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. Clarence Darrow

"Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either." Meg Cabot

Beverly Sills

My advice to anyone with writerly ambitions and a demanding day job is to set aside a little piece of time, even an hour a week if that's all you can manage, and make it yours. This is your writing hour. Even if you use it up by staring at a blank screen and daydreaming, so what? Camille Perri

Overthinking is the art of solving problems you don’t have. James Clear

What I value in books is lucidity. I want the language to be rich; I love lexical fireworks on the page, but I have to know what it means. I want to be surprised and delighted, not merely baffled. Mal Peet

I’m a big believer that all failure is data acquisition. Because your failure didn’t just take something away: it gave you something, too. Elizabeth Day

I sometimes worry about my short attention span, but not for long. Herb Caen

“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.” Gloria Steinem

“Do not let your difficulties fill you with anxiety, after all it is only in the darkest nights that stars shine more brightly.” Ali Ibn Abi Talib

I think we are all insecure, and there is nothing wrong in accepting that. But the problem arises when we try to counter this insecurity by cultivating this illusion of control, and we start taking ourselves and everything we know too seriously. Sushant Singh Rajput

Don’t be afraid of the solitude that comes from raising your standards. Ebonee Davis