Literary Birthday – 19 February – Laurell K. Hamilton

Happy Birthday, Laurell K. Hamilton, born 19 February 1963.10 Quotes On Writing

Writers write. Put your butt in the chair and write on a regular basis.
I’ve lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won’t get a book written. You’ve got to write.
We are very individualistic creatures, we writers. There is no magic formula, or at least not just one. It’s more like there’s a different one for different writers.
The minimum is four pages a day. If I get more than eight then I’m done for the day. I do five days a week like that. If I’m in the middle of a book, I also work Saturday or Sunday to keep the rhythm. I need that continuous rhythm of being in the story.
By 17, I was submitting to publications and collecting my first rejection slips.
I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will.
Don’t rewrite as you go. Don’t try to make your first chapters perfect. If you come to a scene where you don’t know what 14th-century underwear looks like, don’t stop and research 14th-century underwear. Just write “underwear here.” The second draft is filling in those holes.
Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.
It’s a very daunting thing to think you’re going to sit down and write a whole book out of thin air, but you have to work, even when you’re not inspired.
An editor’s job during negotiations is to get the best possible book for the least amount of money. Your goal during the same negotiations is to get the most amount of money possible for the same book. You and she are diametrically opposed.

Laurell K. Hamilton is an American fantasy and romance writer. Six million copies of her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novels, which began with Guilty Pleasures, are in print. She is also known for her Merry Gentry series.