writer

Related to writer: Freelance writer

ghost writer

A writer (usually a professional) who assists in the writing of something (such as a book or speech) without taking credit for it. A: "I'm so impressed with the celebrity memoir I'm reading. I didn't expect this singer to be able to write so well!" B: "Yeah, she probably had a ghost writer!" Being the ghostwriter of some of the president's speeches is the greatest achievement of my life.
See also: ghost, writer

writer's block

The perceived inability to come up with or think of something to write. I was making great progress with my newest novel, but I ran into serious writer's block about halfway through. I've been staring at a blank piece of paper with the worst writer's block of my life.
See also: block

writer's cramp

A cramp in one's hand that arises from gripping a pen or pencil too tightly or for too long at a time. I started getting writer's cramp about two hours into the exam. She was taking notes so fastidiously during class that I worried she'd end up with writer's cramp.
See also: cramp
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

writer's block

the temporary inability for a writer to think of what to write. I have writer's block at the moment and can't seem to get a sensible sentence on paper.
See also: block
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.

writer's cramp

A painful spasm in the hand that restricts the ability to use a pen or pencil. Back in the Paleozoic Era when people wrote by hand instead of typewriters and then computers (you youngsters can ask your parents or grandparents if you don't believe me), excessive use of a pen or pencil would cause a person's hand to tense up or go into a spasm that made further writing painful or impossible or both. The condition wasn't called “repetitive stress syndrome” back then. It was “writer's cramp,” and that was no excuse for the schoolroom punishment of being made to write “I will not talk in class” one hundred times on the blackboard.
See also: cramp
Endangered Phrases by Steven D. Price
See also:
  • address (one's) comments to (someone or something)
  • address comments or remarks to
  • address (one's) remarks to (someone or something)
  • be in it for
  • be at a disadvantage
  • at a disadvantage
  • be more than (something)
  • be more than glad, ready, etc.
  • a run on (something)
  • away from it all
References in classic literature
It argues a certain hardness, or at any rate dislike of the "Iliad" on the part of the writer of the "Odyssey," that she should have adopted Hector's farewell to Andromache here, as elsewhere in the poem, for a scene of such inferior pathos.
{12} The reader will note the extreme care which the writer takes to make it clear that none of the suitors were allowed to sleep in Ulysses' house.
Odyssey
A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness.
The Guardian
Our modern authors of comedy have fallen almost universally into the error here hinted at; their heroes generally are notorious rogues, and their heroines abandoned jades, during the first four acts; but in the fifth, the former become very worthy gentlemen, and the latter women of virtue and discretion: nor is the writer often so kind as to give himself the least trouble to reconcile or account for this monstrous change and incongruity.
Within these few restrictions, I think, every writer may be permitted to deal as much in the wonderful as he pleases; nay, if he thus keeps within the rules of credibility, the more he can surprize the reader the more he will engage his attention, and the more he will charm him.
The History of Tom Jones a Foundling
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer's book.
Winesberg Ohio
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), the first of the rather prominent group of recent Scotch writers of fiction, is as different as possible from Hardy.
The name which naturally closes the list of Victorian writers is that of Rudyard Kipling, though he belongs, perhaps, as much to the twentieth century as to the one preceding.
A History of English Literature
The writer has given only a faint shadow, a dim picture, of the anguish and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive race to frenzy and despair.
Uncle Toms Cabin
Walter Map, like so many of the writers of this early time, was a priest.
English Literature For Boys And Girls
Indeed, a love for any one of these significant writers will be enough, not to speak of an admiration for "Aucassin and Nicolete."
Quest of the Golden Girl
Early and late I was at it--writing, typing, studying grammar, studying writing and all the forms of writing, and studying the writers who succeeded in order to find out how they succeeded.
John Barleycorn
But when Tragedy and Comedy came to light, the two classes of poets still followed their natural bent: the lampooners became writers of Comedy, and the Epic poets were succeeded by Tragedians, since the drama was a larger and higher form of art.
Poetics of Aristotle
"In the meantime original work of a high order was being produced both in England and America by such writers as Bradley, Stout, Bertrand Russell, Baldwin, Urban, Montague, and others, and a new interest in foreign works, German, French and Italian, which had either become classical or were attracting public attention, had developed.
The Analysis of Mind