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Secret Attic Blog

Weekly Write

24/2/2021

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The results for Week 18 have been announced:
HERE
The Weekly Write Week 19 is now Open:
HERE

CHANGES:
From Week 19, the stories received will be posted up on the website anonymously.
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You Write!

23/2/2021

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YouWrite!
You Write! is a brand new magazine publishing stories between 100-5000 words
Publication Dates, in 2021, are as follows:
Issue 1 - April
Issue 2 - August
Issue 3 - December
You need to register a free account at the website to submit.
You Write! is part of Secret Attic - no contests though. Its aim is to become a small publication that is a paying market, so we will see how it grows! 
​GO TO THE WEBSITE

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Everywhere I go, I find more... quotes!

17/2/2021

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"There will come a day, if you persist, when your pen will move nimbly and you will feel elated, and exclaim to yourself: Now I know that I can write,"
ARNOLD BENNETT
"Jilly Cooper has been described as 'insecure and ludicrously sensitive': characteristics of any successful writer,"
MICHAEL JOSEPH
"Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living,"
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
"If you write from the heart, you are writing at the very best of your ability,"
BERNIE ROSS
"I can't write a sex scene. In my first book there was one four-letter word, and my mother saw it and told me off about it. I wrote a sex scene and when Doubleday (publishers) saw it they just laughed at me. They said, 'You don't need it. You are a story-teller,'"
JEFFREY ARCHER
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I've found some more... quotes!

17/2/2021

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"When I was ten, my dad bought me a second-hand typewriter and I typed out these little tales and stitched them in a folder with a hand-painted title. When I was twelve I submitted one - about a little horse, I think - to something called The Children's Mag and it was actually published. I have never stopped writing since,"
BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD
"Write hard and clear about what hurts,"
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath,"
F.SCOTT FITZGERALD
"Don't allow yourself to get fussed over how to begin. Don't sit staring at a blank screen,"
DONNA LEVIN
"Raising questions and then supplying plausible, yet unexpected answers, this is the job of the storyteller,"
DAVID GERROLD
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And theses quotes too...

17/2/2021

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"Fiction fatigue - expect it, and don't let it ruin your story,"
ANSEN DIBELL
"I would never write about someone who is not at the end of his rope,"
STANLEY ELKIN
"Give the readers a book with people they care about and they will queue up to shake the author's hand,"
NORMAN COUSINS
"An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke,"
F.SCOTT FITZGERALD
"Always remember your reader, or else you are talking to yourself,"
NIGEL WATTS
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More and more Quotes!

17/2/2021

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ROALD DAHL
"I don't have much time for a playwright that can't write a book, because I don't think they can. A play is a piece of cake to write, it you can write dialogue, and you can plot. They get much lauded, everyone from Tennesse Williams to Pinter and Stoppard. I'd like to see them write a novel. They couldn't in my opinion."
JOSEPH WAMBAUGH
"I've never had a short story published. So, in a way, I didn't really achieve my ambition. In that sense I'm still a failure."
FORD MADOX FORD
"When in doubt, cut."
PLINY THE YOUNGER
"Too much polishing weakens rather than improves a work."
ANSEN DIBELL
"An even battle is more fun to watch."
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
"The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself."
STANLEY UNWIN
"Most authors would consider it undesirable to approach a publisher in a dirty incoherent condition. But that is, in effect, what they do when they submit a dirty and dilapidated manuscript."
RAYMOND BRADBURY
"First, find out what the hero wants and then just follow him/her."
SAMUEL JOHNSON
"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
HG WELLS
"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."

ROBERT BENCHLEY
"It took me 15 years to discover I had no talent for writing. But I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."
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And even more quotes...

17/2/2021

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​HEMINGWAY
"The most essential gift of a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector,"
ANSEN DIBBLE
"Plot is a Verb,"
ANSEN DIBBLE
"If the summary of your own story turns out to be one you haven't already seen fifty times, so much the better. If not, don't worry: all the love stories haven't yet been written, nor anything close,"
JEAN SAUNDERS
"Beginning a character's dialogue by letting him name the other person is the obvious way of telling the reader to whom he is speaking,"
WILLIAM STRUNK & EB WHITE
"Rather, very, little, pretty - these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words...we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is rather an important one and we are pretty sure to violate it now and again,"
RING LARDNER
"A good too many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a SAE big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor,"
DOMINICK DUNNE
"Get that first draft down on paper. If you are stuck in some section just put a page with 'here so-and-so finds out where the key was hidden,' or 'here there's a scene where they fall in love,' or ' I don't know exactly what happens here,' then plunge on. Get it all down. Finish the book.
RAYMOND BRADBURY
"I have had a sign on my typewriter for 20 years, that says - 'don't think, do it!',"
CATHERINE COOKSON
"I'm a frustrated actress. I act all these characters. If I don't cry about them, if I don't laugh at their jokes, if I don't lose my temper and if I don't swear, it doesn't seem that I am writing them; someone else is. I act all these characters, I live these characters. And I never use four-letter words either, just all the 'damns' and 'blasts', and nor will I go into the dockyard atrocities of sex. I imply it and let the reader take it from there,"
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More Quotes...

17/2/2021

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SAMUEL JOHNSON
"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
HG WELLS
"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
ROBERT BENCHLEY
"It took me 15 years to discover I had no talent for writing. But I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."
ROALD DAHL
To spice the short replies to his fan mail he would often include a little poem. This is just one of many ~
'Dear children far across the sea,
How nice of you to write to me;
I love to hear the things you say,
When you are miles and miles away.
All children, and I think I'm right,
Are nicer when they're out of sight.'
JEFFREY ARCHER
"People write to me from all over the world and I say to them: Sit down, and write a story about what you know. If you are good at it, we'll all read it. It doesn't matter where you are or what you are doing, a good story-teller just tells a story. Kane and Abel couldn't be more simple,"
DOROTHY PARKER
"If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best that you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best that you can do that kills you,"
JOHN IRVING
"Know the story - as much of the story as you can possibly know if not the whole story - before you commit yourself to the first paragraph. Know the story - the whole story if possible - before you fall in love with your first sentence, not to mention your first chapter. If you don't know the story before you begin, what kind of storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind, making it up as you go along like a common liar,"
LORD BYRON
"Gin and water is the source of all my inspiration."
ERNEST DOWSON
"Whisky and beer for fools; absinthe for poets."
PHILIP LARKIN
"Really, I can't imagine the drug scene. My generation are drinkers and smokers; I wouldn't stick a needle in myself for a hatful of golden guineas."
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
"It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts."
ISAAC BABEL
"No iron can stab the heart with such force as a full stop put just at the right place."
MARTIAL AD C.40-C.104 Epigrammata,tr. James Michie ~
"It's almost a month now, and I've scarcely finished a single page."
WILLIAM TREVOR
"All experience is good for writers - except for physical pain."
CHARLES READE
"Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait,"
NATALIE GOLDBERG
"Stay with what it is and it will give you everything that isn't. From this wooden table I am learning on, I can build a whole world of fiction,"
CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON
"Asking a writer what he thinks about critics, is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs."
DAVID LODGE
"The title of the novel is part of the text, the first part of it, in fact, that we encounter - and therefore has considerable power to attract and condition the reader's attention."
JAMES HERRIOT
"I have never written for more than half an hour in my life. Writing to me only occupies a teeny wee bit of my life. And to be truthful, I hate writing. I wouldn't like the idea of writing all day at all."
HEMINGWAY
"If a writer knows something, even if he doesn't write it, it is present in his work."
CAROLYN MACKENZIE
"If you have a skeleton in your cupboard, take it out and dance with it."
STANLEY UNWIN
"If a publisher declines your manuscript, remember it is merely the decision of one fallible human being, try another."
JAMES ELROY
"If you really want to achieve greatness, you have to keep challenging yourself. You have to keep going back into yourself."
SIDNEY SHELDON
"What all of us must do is get an idea that excites US and then write the hell out of it. Write it as well as you know how. And if you hit a nerve, and it's true, then you have a chance."
ALEX HAILEY
"As a writer, you're rejected so often that you have to develop a resilience. So when I'm down it rarely lasts...I search around until I find something to get excited about."
KEITH WATERHOUSE
"Do they keep throwing the book at Jeffrey Archer as an act of revenge for his lousy novels?"
CECIL DAWKINS
"You wrote too fast. You're scared. Slow down. You shouldn't write a short story in less than two months."
DANNY SIMON
"The beginning is the 'want', the middle the 'conflict' and the end is the 'resolution'."

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Quotes

17/2/2021

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"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong."
Claude M. Bristol
"Everyone has a good poem hidden in their head."
Don Welch
"Write about it by day, and dream about it by night."
E.B. White
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To write simply is as difficult as to be good."
Somerset Maugham
"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action."
William Shakespeare
"When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair."
Robert Stone
"First thought, best thought."
Allen Ginsberg
"Third thought, best thought."
Frank Conroy
"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
E.L. Doctorow
"Any work of art must first of all tell a story."
Robert Frost
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
Thomas Mann
"I'm going to write because I cannot help it."
Charlotte Bronte
"I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I write and I understand."
Chinese Proverb
"Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
Harper Lee ​
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Weekly Write #17

17/2/2021

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Weekly Write Week 17 Results announced & League Table Updated:
https://secret-attic.co.uk/ww-results.html
​
https://secret-attic.co.uk/league-table.html
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