Writing Quotes - Page 50

Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

Pansy Schneider-Horst

I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.

Dorothy L. Sayers

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.

It's 1am, I have fiction to write!

My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability, as a child, to lie with a straight face.

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

Characters are just extensions of my madness.

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.

Elin Hilderbrand

The only thing better than a well-read book is a well-read book only read by yourself.

The imagination is a wild and dangerous forest that is impossible to know the full might of.

The only thing more interesting than the truth is fiction dressed up as the truth.

On the blank page all things are possible.

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.

David Foster Wallace

I'm a writer. I write checks. Mostly fiction.

Novels are just very, very, very long lies. That is to say, you’ve got to get your story straight!

Blair Thornburgh

If one were to reply that those who compose these books write them as fictions, and therefore are not obliged to consider the fine points of truth, I should respond that the more truthful the fiction, the better it is, and the more probable and possible, the more pleasing. Fictional tales must engage the minds of those who read them, and by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility, they enthrall the spirit and thereby astonish, captivate, delight, and entertain, allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace; none of these things can be accomplished by fleeing verisimilitude and mimesis, which together constitute perfection in writing.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?

When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories.

The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.

I have inflammation of the imagination.

I seek to take my audience on an emotional roller-coaster ride, a journey of laughter and tears and every sentiment in between.

What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes", and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so--it's a drag to be lectured to--but what does that imply about our attitudes towards intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books.I want to write novels that engage the emotions and the intellect, and that means going head to head with the chaos of evils and issues that threaten to overpower us all. And if they threaten to overpower the characters, then I have to make the characters stronger.

I write fiction""What’s fiction?""Fiction is an improvement on life.

Charles Bukowski

While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights)

Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art.

Writing is about truth, whether it be fiction or a school essay. Don't give in and 'fake it till you make it.' Criticize what upsets you.

Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic.

Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing.

Typically, we start out with enthusiasm and then grow unsure--sometimes about everything.

Eric Maisel Ph.D.

I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

Catherine Lowell

My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them—even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage.

Catherine Lowell

Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book. What you need is subtlety.

Backstory is like a flavour you can’t quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it’s there and it enhances the flavour, but it’s intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly!

Delayed gratification hints that something terrible is going to happen, and then delays the resolution. It’s that interval between the promise of something awful and it actually happening, where suspense resides.

Suspense doesn’t always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story.

The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.

great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said.

I am convinced that if stories such as these have any lasting value, it is in revealing the kind of work young pulp-writers were doing in those days when rates were low and one had to make a typewriter smoke in order to keep eating.

every man has his own story, his own agony("The Watcher O' The Dead")

Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.

If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Let your writing liberate you. Write with passion to allow your feelings to breathe and enjoy the journey across blank pages.

Amitav Chowdhury

Be determined. Be persistent. Be consistent," the muse said. "Then he looked at me and winked. "Never give up, dumb-ass.

Early in 1967 Highsmith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' Highsmith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'.

It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural. He may be. No one certainly can be sure of his low motives except as they suggest themselves in his finished work, but when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have already been defeated. What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of an abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.

Flannery O'Connor

I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

Flannery O'Connor

Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.

Flannery O'Connor

Authors are supernatural beings. They exist in the world, also in worlds they create, and in the worlds of other authors they read.

If something unusual is what you really see and really feel, and if that’s what does happen to you in your real life, how is THAT called FICTION? One simple reason... that it’s the only way the society would agree to call it “normal,” based on the current level of development of their mentality.

Each time I discovered a potential link between one character’s story and another’s, several more connections would reveal themselves, like a beautiful, complex web spinning itself.

Richard Scarsbrook

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

One thing an early-on writer has to learn, is to be comfortable with and responsive to critique. When five people in a group tell you this chapter sucks; don’t snap back at them with, “Sure, but it gets better in another 6 or 7 chapters!”Listen. – Thank them. – Consider.They can look from a fresh perspective, and catch things that you might be too close to see.But, you will also learn along the way that not everyone in a group of relative amateurs themselves, is going to catch everything, and there will be a few who seem to never understand much of anything.Some will always want paragraphs chopped down to explosive missiles of passion, while others are more used to long composite paragraphs that I myself find impossible to wade through.You may, once you have hit your full stride and power, feel comfortable telling a few of them, “Look. This isn’t a diner. I don’t take orders: ‘I’m gluten intolerant; he can’t do salt; she’s allergic to peanuts ...’“If what I offer is a salad bar, then No; I am not going to fry you up a cheesesteak!

Great characters- They are pivotal for a great plot. THEN a solid plot: Why then? If you do not have great characters it is impossible to create a good plot, nonetheless a solid one. Once you have built great characters for the scenes, there you have it. It’s just like the movies, you cannot have a great film if the characters are frail and their lines are weak as well. I guess great world-building comes along with a good plot. If there is something that will work fine in a novel is how you will develop from the theme. You’ve got to establish a good timeline, and from there it comes a world. You see the technical matters don’t match or matter as much to me. Even a poorly written story, if there is a good plot and great characters on it will make a divine combination There are simply many cases of it over the mainstream and that even reached the big screen.

Ana Claudia Antunes

As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.

Charlie Jane Anders

I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.

I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever lost.

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn't count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer.

Writing isn't black magic. You just have to come up with an idea...

Karl Ove Knausgård

Previous 1 … 48 49 50 51 52 … 122 Next