Inspiring writing advice from Ray Bradbury, Toni Morrison, Madeleine L'Engle...and 47 more authors who changed the world

Welcome to Write With Impact, my new series on LinkedIn! Writing well is an essential skill most of us need to hone and apply at work, at school, even at home. My aim with this series is to share some of what I've learned over the course of my 20-year career as a business writer and editor. I'll also share snippets of conversations and writing advice from my top-rated podcast, Write With Impact.

Please hit the subscribe button, leave a comment, and reach out and connect with me here on LinkedIn. Send me your suggestions for topics I should cover in future articles. And, if you have a bit more spare time (maybe a long commute to work in the morning), and you're interested in listening to conversations with award-winning authors, check out my podcast, Write With Impact, available on Apple Podcasts.

For a sample of some of my recent articles on writing, check out How to find your most productive spot for writing, Yes, you can become a better writer, or These books will help you beat procrastination and get more writing done.

Here's a fun piece to kick-off the series...

It's never been a better time to be a writer—or aspire to become one.

Platforms like LinkedIn, Medium, and WordPress have placed billions of dollars of technology, and the power that once only belonged to major publishing and media firms, into the hands of millions of writers—and entirely for free.

But technology can only take a writer so far. Writing is a craft that needs to be developed through deliberate study and practice. Fortunately, some of the world's greatest writers, the ones who mastered the craft and whose names have been passed down to us through time, gifted us not only with their stories. Many of them took time in-between the creation of their novels and short stories and poems to codify their writing philosophies, document their writing strategies, and share their writing habits. They recorded their thoughts on writing in books, as essays, and as letters to friends, lovers, and editors.

So, if you're ever in need of some quick inspiration to get you started and keep your words flowing on the page, try dipping into the wisdom of these great authors:

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. —Madeleine L'Engle

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. —Stephen King

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. —Ana?s Nin

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. —Mark Twain

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. —Toni Morrison

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. —Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. —Benjamin Franklin

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. —Saul Bellow

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. —Robert Frost

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window." —William Faulkner

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. —Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. —Henry David Thoreau

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. —Anne Frank

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. —Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences. —Sylvia Plath,  The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons...All they do is show you've been to college. —Kurt Vonnegut Jr.,  A Man Without a Country

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. —Franz Kafka

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. —Robert Louis Stevenson

You can make anything by writing. —C.S. Lewis

A word after a word after a word is power. —Margaret Atwood

Tears are words that need to be written. —Paulo Coelho

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write. —Annie Proulx

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within. ― Eudora Welty,  On Writing

To survive, you must tell stories. —Umberto Eco,  The Island of the Day Before

Always be a poet, even in prose. —Charles Baudelaire

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. —Isaac Asimov

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. —Albert Camus

I write to discover what I know. —Flannery O'Connor

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. ― John Steinbeck

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time—proof that humans can work magic. ― Carl Sagan

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. ― Hermann Hesse

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. ― Norman Mailer

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. ― Rainer Maria Rilke

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand. ― Ernest Hemingway

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends. ― Friedrich Nietzsche

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. —Thomas Jefferson

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. —Elmore Leonard

Writers live twice. —Natalie Goldberg

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. —Herman Melville

Words are a lens to focus one's mind. —Ayn Rand

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. —Gustave Flaubert

Writing is its own reward. —Henry Miller

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God. —Sidney Sheldon

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. —Erica Jong

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. —Douglas Adams

"Half my life is an act of revision." —John Irving

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good. —William Faulkner

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being. —A. A. Milne

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”― Marcel Proust,  Time Regained

Thanks for reading! Please hit the subscribe button to my new series, leave a comment, and let's connect here on LinkedIn. And please check out my podcast, Write With Impact, available on Apple Podcasts.

Photo credits: Ray Bradbury, by Alan Light; Toni Morrison, by Angela Radulescu; Madeleine L'Engle, by Square Fish Books