Fiction Writing Process Quotes

There's an analogy I came up with once for an interviewer who asked me how much of my material was autobiographical," Octavia says. "I said that the life experience of a fiction writer is like butter in cookie dough: it's a crucial part of flavor and texture - you certainly couldn't leave it out - but if you've done it right, it can't be discerned as a separate element. There shouldn't be a place that anyone can point to and say, There--she's talking about her miscarriage, or Look--he wrote that because his wife had an affair ~ Carolyn Parkhurst

You know you've spent a lot of time writing fiction when you meet a new person and instead of asking them about what they do, or where they're from, you ask "what's your backstory? ~ David Filmore

An author who rewrites his own work must essentially be two people. One is the free flowing uncritical writer who creates the bulk of the material - the other is the extremely critical editor whose aim it is to make the book as good as it can become. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow! ~ John Gaver

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra - they'll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I'm too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I'm syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style. ~ Zadie Smith

It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it. ~ Jon McGregor

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family. ~ Garrison Keillor

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe. ~ Neil Gaiman

There are thousands of talented writers at work in America, and only a few of them (I think the number might be as low as five per cent) can support their families and themselves with their work. There's always some grant money available, but it's never enough to go around. As for government subsidies for creative writers, perish the thought. Tobacco subsidies, sure. Research grants to study the motility of unpreserved bull sperm, of course. Creative-writing subsidies, never. …America has never much revered her creative people; as a whole, we're more interested in commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint and Internet greeting-cards. And if you don't like it, it's a case of tough titty, said the kitty, 'cause that's just the way things are. Americans are a lot more interested in TV quiz shows than in the short fiction of Raymond Carver. ~ Stephen King

Writing is more about telling other peoples' stories than your own ~ Carla H. Krueger

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life. ~ Ralph Peters

The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that no one is stopping you. There's no one saying, 'You can't do that.' ~ Rebecca Stead

Good writing is rhythm. ~ William Peter Blatty

Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Writing at its best is simply taking dictation from your soul. ~ Catherine Carrigan

Authors of so-called 'literary' fiction insist that action, like plot, is vulgar and unworthy of a true artist. Don't pay any attention to misguided advice of that sort. If you do, you will very likely starve trying to live on your writing income. Besides, the only writers who survive the ages are those who understand the need for action in a novel. ~ Dean Koontz

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Don't start right off writing the 'Great American Novel', that's too much pressure and you'll get disappointed; start with porn, it's fun and a good way to get your feet wet. ~ Scavola

Never wait for your muse. Train him/her to show up to work when you do by pushing on. It's a dominant submission thing. ~ Darynda Jones

Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature. ~ Ted Hughes

In my long career in this historical fiction business, though, I've found that the most effective storytelling concept is this: Once upon a time it was now.
That has become my credo and my method as a longtime historical novelist.
It's quite simple, if you see as Janus sees:
Today is now.
Yesterday was now.
Tomorrow will be now.
Three hundred years ago, the eighteenth century was now.
You, as a historical novelist, can make any time now by taking your reader into that time. Once you grasp that, the rest is just hard work.
Stay with me, and you'll see how such work is done. ~ James Alexander Thom

Write fiction about your life and pay with your life, at least three times. Here is the ax. ~ Alexander Chee

Writing a book is about me doing the work to get from the obsessive particular to something that reaches out of that in some meaningful way. It doesn't come easy to me. I really admire people who do it with acuity, but I don't, and for me it takes the process of working on a book for years to do any thinking that I feel accomplishes anything. I don't do it off the cuff well. ~ Lucy Corin

Writing is something you Do and not discuss. Talk is cheap, wishes are free and a fool is included with every purchase. So spend your time wisely. ~ Jaime Reed

I knew that it was impossible for us to be kept apart for too long. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it. ~ Walter Dean Myers

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding. ~ Geraldine Brooks

No writer ever puts into words which he or she thinks is unnecessary; learning how to discover that some are is one of the chief challenges in learning to write. ~ Anne E. Berthoff

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

I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction you're going to get bashed by critics. ~ John Grisham

He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect. ~ Jo Baker

When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction. Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters' heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel so close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those characters. ~ Jerome Stern

I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro. ~ Ted Chiang

Initially I was sad and lonely. I would spend sleepless nights feeling morose, sad, and dejected. I suffered from depression. I would go blank some moments. I would collapse in my room in utter sadness.

Then I fought back at life. I wanted to give life a good fight. I embraced each struggle and each hardship in my life. I started reading and writing with passion. I started writing regularly. And I started sharing my emotions, feelings, thoughts, and stories with others. ~ Avijeet Das

And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now. ~ Nicholas Stoller

For me writing and filmmaking is a therapeutic process. It reflects themes that I'm going through at a time in my life. ~ Mark Webber

Three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:
1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot.
2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.
3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask. ~ Edwidge Danticat

The fastest way to revise a piece of work is to send it, late at night, to someone whose opinion you fear. Then rewrite it, praying you'll finish in time to send a new version by morning. ~ Sarah Manguso

I do really enjoy Jay McInerney's wine writing. He's a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He's not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it. ~ Mike D

There's a bit of hope that a song can be about anything. If you want to write a song about anything, you can, and you don't have to put it through the process of having it be trendy or cool or generic pop or these types. ~ M.I.A.

The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them. ~ Claudia Bakker

I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth. ~ Cornell Woolrich

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel. ~ M.J. Rose