Encouragement For Writers
In this post, we hope to provide some words of encouragement for writers through inspirational and also motivational quotes. We hope these quotes for writers will give you the push you need to start out writing good stuff.
Firstly, Writing can sometimes feel like a lonely endeavor and being part of a writing community like Christian Book Academy can also go a long way in alleviating some of this loneliness but we’ll still have to face down our writing demons and lastly, encouragement for writers is something we want to constantly share as you continue on your writing journey.
50 Inspirational Quotes about Encouragement for Writers
- “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett
- “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” – Jodi Picoult
- “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach
- “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour
- “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” – Jack Kerouac
- “The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” – Agatha Christie
- “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” – Anne Frank
- “A word after a word after a word is power.” – Margaret Atwood
- “Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” – Ray Bradbury
- “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs
- “Write what should not be forgotten.” – Isabel Allende
- “Write the book that wants to be written.” – Madeleine L’Engle
- “You fail only if you stop writing.” – Ray Bradbury
- “I write to discover what I know.” – Flannery O’Connor
- “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” – Thomas Mann
- “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath
- “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it.” – Sylvia Plath
- “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury
- “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” – Eugene Ionesco
- “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison
- “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” – Stephen King
- “You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis
- “Write hard and clear about what hurts.” – Ernest Hemingway
- “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” – Flannery O’Connor
- “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” – E.L. Doctorow
- “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – Albert Camus
- “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.” – John Cheever
- “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E.L. Doctorow
- “A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader, the writer learns.” – P.L. Travers
- “Writing is its own reward.” – Henry Miller
- “Every writer I know has trouble writing.” – Joseph Heller
- “It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.” – C.J. Cherryh
- “Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” – William Carlos Williams
- “The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.” – Thomas Mann
- “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” – Herman Melville
- “I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.” – Isaac Asimov
- “Writing is the painting of the voice.” – Voltaire
- “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” – Anaïs Nin
- “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” – David McCullough
- “A writer is a world trapped in a person.” – Victor Hugo
- “Writing is a struggle against silence.” – Carlos Fuentes
- “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” – Martin Luther
- “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anaïs Nin
- “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” – Robert Frost
- “Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” – Ayn Rand
- “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” – Isaac Asimov
- “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” – Sylvia Plath
- “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” – Mark Twain
- “Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days, nothing else matters.” – Neil Gaiman
- “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” – Orson Scott Card
- “Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” ― Jane Yolen
- “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” — Anne Lamott
- “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Platt
- “A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” — Roald Dahl
- “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway
- “Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.” — Barbara Kingsolver
- “Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” — Ray Bradbury
How about you? What’s your favorite quote?
Encouragement for Writers
A “lion” and a Lion
There are lots of writers in the world, but the Kingdom writer is one who desires to leave an eternal mark with the words they write. Consequently, we will have a target on our backsand there’s a spiritual enemy who wants to paralyze us and also prevent our writing from reaching its full potential.
“Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” – 1 Peter 5:8 (NLT)
This ‘great enemy’ looks to devour Kingdom writers and derail them from making an eternal impact and also there are people around the world who need the words God inspires through your writing and the devil knows it.
But here’s some encouragement for writers,
“But one of the twenty-four elders said to me, “Stop weeping! Look, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the heir to David’s throne has won the victory…” – Revelation 5:5a (NLT)
This isn’t just another toothless and roaring lion. This is THE Lion, otherwise known as Jesus! As Kingdom writers who seek to glorify Jesus and we have the opportunity to write from a position of victory.
By the way, those words in Revelation were given to a fellow Kingdom writer named John who just happened to write 20% of the New Testament that you and also I have in our hands today.
Resistance Will Come
Author Donald Miller says that he faces resistance almost every time he sits down to write. Furthermore, when he came to recognize this insidious temptation to do anything but write, he started “calling BS on resistance,” in his own words.
In other words, he wasn’t going to allow this feeling of resistance to win the writing battle. Instead, he simply acknowledges the very real feeling and then moves forward with his writing session.
This realization for a prolific writer like Miller is encouragement for writers like you and I.
When we humbly call BS on resistance and we aren’t denying it’s there. Instead, we can say, “I see you and understand that you’d like me to do something else, but that’s not going to happen because I choose to put my butt in this chair and write words that glorify God.”
We can actually turn the tables on the enemy who resists our writing goals,
“So humble yourselves before God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” – James 4:7 (NLT)
Resist the resistance! Those are words of encouragement for writers and God has too much to do through you and I.
Progress is Success
Our friend and author Andrew Arndt recently tweeted these words of encouragement for writers,
“Sometimes writing is writing. Sometimes writing is editing. Sometimes writing is reading. Sometimes writing is just sitting and thinking. That’s a way of saying: Don’t judge a writing session by how much writing you did. It’s all useful. And none of it is wasted. Just keep at it.”
Isn’t that liberating?
Forward progress in your writing journey
Firstly, Forward progress in our writing journey is going to look different from day to day and the person who hikes the Appalachian Trail (roughly 2,190 miles) may go thirty miles one day while going ten miles the next day. Either way, they’ve made progress.
Similarly, and as Andrew mentioned in his tweet that we can’t just evaluate a writing session based on the number of words that we produced and each session will also have its own distinctive characteristics.
I love these words that Paul wrote to his young protégé Timothy; in particular
“Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching. Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you. Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress.” – 1 Timothy 4:13-15 (NIV, emphasis mine)
If writing is a primary gift you and I have been given, and we also need to “be diligent in these matters and give ourselves wholly to them.” Therefore, we give ourselves to writing, editing, reading, sitting, and lastly, thinking. Additionally, may I also add praying? It’s all progress in the pursuit of Kingdom writing as well.
Additionally,please feel free to share your words of encouragement for writers in the comments below because we can never have too much encouragement for writers.
Resources for encouragement for writers
- Furthermore, you can get more encouragement on Christian Book Academy and it’s also an online membership where you can ask questions, get feedback, and lastly receive prayer so that you can overcome the resistance and spiritual battles you face as a writer. We also invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers here.
- Hitz Blitz Private Podcast: Wisdom for Writers is where you can get coaching from Shelley’s experience in writing books and you can also subscribe for free here.
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