OurStories :: A Literary Journal

"Thanks for all the good feedback. I'm sure you know how unusual it is to get feedback of any kind, whether a piece has been accepted or rejected. I think you've got a really good thing going--SMART!"
--Anne Germanacos

and some of the masters on writing...

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part, unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.

John Gardner

	I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
Vladimir Nabokov

	The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway

	The pleasure is the rewriting: The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don’t mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it’s simply true. The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning.
Joyce Carol Oates

	You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.
Katherine Anne Porter

	Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
Stephen King

	Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
Michael Crichton