In today's world, credentials are king, marketability (your ability to make people believe in your product) comes a close second, and publication completes the trifecta. With less than two months to go until The Art of Falling releases, I am in the throes of answering interview questions for my blog tour. Now that I have a book coming out, it’s as if I’ve tripped over a line of wisdom, and people want to know what I have to say. But advance degrees and marketing savvy are artificial qualifications as concerns gaining wisdom. Wisdom comes from the school of hard knocks, when life pushes you up against a wall and says, "this is NOT working!" Since this is the place we send our characters to see what they are made of, quotes arise from our stories as our characters fight towards hard-won wisdom. People love such quotes, that they can print out and paste on their wall. Just look at the number of “highlighters” that litter the pages of your Kindle. Here’s one from Rol...

I was looking through some quotes by writers for a project I'm working on, and some of the quotes were so good I thought I'd share them here. "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith "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 a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." ~ E.L. Doctorow "If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." ~Toni Morrison "What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers." ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931 "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart." ~William Wordsworth "The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become ...