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Sam Sykes Quotes

Total quotes: 26
“We don’t put enough emphasis on emotional intelligence and it’s left people unable to figure out how to handle their own.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: emotions, Emotional Intelligence, Feelings, Mental Health, Mental Health Awareness
“Ideally, every event in a book should serve a purpose. But it’s totally fine to write a scene because you want to and figure out its purpose later.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Writing, Writing Advice, writing a novel
“I've said it many times before and it's no less true now: it's okay to be proud of your work. It's okay to promote your work.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Empowering, self, Self-Love, Self-appreciation, Creation, Work
“If you're having trouble writing fight scenes, I wholeheartedly recommend watching any Jackie Chan movie. Study not only how the choreography keeps things moving across a screen, but also how much emotion he conveys in a fight.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Writing, Writing Advice, Writing Techniques, Writing Tips
“It's so weird how the mere act of listening to people has become the most precious commodity a human can give or hoard.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Listening, act of listening, Listening To Others, listen to people's problems
“A good exercise is to take everything out of the scene you’re writing, leaving only the dialogue, and see if you can still tell who’s talking.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Writing, Writing Advice, Writing Tips, writing dialogues
“WRITING PROTIP: Finding it hard to maintain concentration? Just stop thinking about all the ways it could fail and how the world might be completely destroyed before you finish!”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Writing, Writing Tips, Writing Advice, keep writing
“Read more books, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. Read stories about other people, other emotions. Get emotions that you can’t get from daily life just now.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: emotions, Feelings, Books, Stories, Empathy, Reading
“Anxiety is exacerbated by a loss of control. Remember to prioritize issues based on what you can do for them, rather than how much stress they cause. The more effort you can make, the more in control you’ll feel.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Anxiety, Mental Health
“A lesson to learn is to protect your dignity and self-worth as a creator. A lot of people want to buy it, and some may offer a high price tag, but once it’s gone, you can’t get it back.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: creator, Artist, writer, Craft, Ideas, Creation, Art
“Something we don't talk about when it comes to worldbuilding is the power of NOT explaining something. Sometimes, just throwing out a word and letting the audience wonder what that could be is a good thing.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: worldbuilding, Stories, Writing, writing a novel, writing a story
“Positive change in the world, too, is an accumulation. Don't attribute tragedy to a personal failing. Do right by others and by yourself and you'll see your own life, and later the world's, shift for the better.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Positive Change, change in the world, change in thinking, live for a good cause, live rightly, Goodness, kindness, Life, life advice
“It's weird when someone leaves a review that's 90% composed of how much they hated a character and you know that's incorrect. If they really hated them, they wouldn't have spent that much time talking about them.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: writer reason, Writer's Truth, writer's words, characters in a story
“Realtalk: Writing is a career. It has a community. You have colleagues. To suggest that you don't need or shouldn't want any of these things is ridiculous. Colleagues help each other out.”
— Sam Sykes, via twitter.com
Tagged: Writing, Writing As A Career, writing community, Writer's Truth
“Think of how much of your life you spend opening doors
think how much time you could reclaim by just running through them”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: opportunities, chances, Dreams, Goals, Doing What You Want, Never Give Up, reaching dreams, Life
“It's true you can't teach humor. But it's pretty easy to set up a joke the same way you set up a conflict: put a character in a situation they're not equipped to handle.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: humor, characters, Films, Stories
“Anxiety traps you in your own head by lying to you, making you think things are impossibly bad so you won’t try to fix it. Let people help you by offering outside perspective.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Anxiety, Mental Health, Counseling
“A lot of aspiring writers ask me about how much they should be writing per day. The answer, of course, is about half as much as you spend rolling on the floor and sobbing.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Writing, Writing Advice, humor
“Muting and unfollowing some people have taught me that there are people ostensibly on your side that are 100% committed and invested in keeping you stressed and terrorized.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Twitter, Social Media, annoying people
“Game of Thrones saw its original print run remaindered.
Outlander once came with a money back guarantee on its cover.
Marvel Comics almost went bankrupt in 1996.
No setback is permanent. No failure is absolute. It is never too late to create or succeed.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Failures, setbacks, Success, Life, life is mysterious, Inspirational, Empowering, Uplifting
“If you view the writing process as a creative wellspring from which ideas simply come out fully-formed and beautiful, you'll be disappointed.

If you view it as a craft you work on and can improve, you'll know a bad day of writing is something you can fix.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Writing, Writing Advice, writing is a craft
“Tools for Writing:
1. Computer
2. Thesaurus
3. Shovel
3a. Hole you dig in your yard to escape the terror that your writing might simply be screaming into a void from which no sound, nor dream escapes
3b. None at all
4. Coffee or tea (gotta have that caffeine!)”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Writing, writing tools, humor
“A novel has roughly six stages of 'done.'
1: 'I know how it ends, but not how to do it.'
2: 'I know how to do it, but haven't written it.'
3: 'I wrote it, but it sucks.'
4: 'I wrote it again, but it needs work.'
5: 'I finished the work, but I'm still not happy.'
6: 'good enough'”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Writing, writing process, writing a novel, Writing Consciously, writing truth
“Tonight I sat down to write and found nothing happening. This has happened to me ten thousand times before and no time has it ever been helped by berating myself, yet that's immediately what I did. It's weird how this job induces selective amnesia.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Writing, Writing Problems, writing truth, Writer's Truth, writing a novel
“There is absolutely zero way to predict how your creative career will go. You could be read by a producer and get a movie tomorrow. You could hit it big 10 years from now. No one knows.

The anxiety, of course, comes from the fact that it's hard to plan a future around something no one knows anything about. The only thing you can control is the work. So get back to it.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Creative Life, creative career, Writing, Writing As A Career, Writer's Truth, writer's life, Life, Motivational
“I feel like 'fun' is frequently dismissed as a quality of a book, usually played down as escapism or, usually, just as a side note. Few people actually talk about what a fun book means.

For me, it’s never meant escapism. 'Fun' means joy. It means the prose is exciting, the characters are great, the action is delightful. All of this translates to reader investment.

People who sneer at the concept of a fun book as mindless escapism may understand reader investment, but they rarely understand that you have to earn it.

That’s not to say fun is the ONLY way to earn reader investment. But it’s a good way. And it’s harder to do than it looks. Hence why there is a not insignificant number of dry, joyless fantasy novels out there.”
— Sam Sykes
Tagged: Books, Novels, Readers, reader's preference, books as entertainment, fun in reading
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