Learned.

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well.  Better to produce half as much, get plenty of exercise and not go crazy than to speed up so that your head is hardly normal.

Ernest Hemingway, from A Moveable Feast

Unforeseen.

Thank you, Walker's Arms.

Click.

In the author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the author’s impulse complete. It is now a thing inside him pawing to get out. He longs to see this bubbling stuff pouring into that form as the housewife longs to see the new jam pouring into the clean jam jar. This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It’s like being in love.

C.S. Lewis, from Of Other Worlds

Exactly.

It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them. But there may be an author who at a particular moment finds not only fantasy but fantasy-for-children the exactly right form for what he wants to say. The distinction is a fine one. His fantasies for children and his fantasies for adults will have very much more in common with one another than either has with the ordinary novel or with what is sometimes called "the novel of child life."  Indeed the same readers will probably read both his fantastic "juveniles" and his fantastic stories for adults. For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting-out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.  No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table. The distinction, then, is a fine one: and I am not quite sure what made me, in a particular year of my life, feel that not only a fairy tale, but a fairy tale addressed to children, was exactly what I must write—or burst. 

C.S. Lewis, from "On Three Ways for Writing for Children"

Just.

Just as two plus two is four and the sun rises in the morning ...

Beware.

A discarded title page from The Autumn People, late 1959.

Stories.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me when I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, the little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, "Sir, write me, I am beautiful."

Umberto Eco

Clarity.

Philip Pullman on clarity in storytelling ...

I dread that somebody one day will go to Oxford and use that map to find their way around, walk into another universe, and never be seen again.