Fiction Writing Quotes

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus. ~ Susan Orlean

I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it. ~ Joan Larkin

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want. ~ Frederik Pohl

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself. ~ Harlan Ellison

Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction. ~ Robert Boswell

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

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good. ~ David Foster Wallace

I enjoy writing historical fiction because it allows me to live more lives than just this one. ~ Karen A. Chase

February 9th was HIS day. The day he always striked. ~ Mary Papas

She opened her eyes and looked into his rather intensely.
"What?" Alex asked.
"This cannot be."
"What can't be?" Alex asked her, more bafflement in his voice this time.
"I have been reading people all my life. I can even read cats and dogs. I've been doing it all my life and i've been here longer than the two of you put together."
"And?" Alex wanted to get to the point. Whatever the truth may be, he just wanted to hear it, wanted it on the table before them so he could get this over with and they can go home.
"AND ... you are the first person that has nothing for me to see."
"And here I was hoping you'd say I'd win the lottery or get married to a supermodel or something." Alex said, starting to laugh.
"You don't understand. I don't see anything, anything at all. There is nothing to you, nothing but what I see before me."
"So ... what does that mean?"
"It means you don't exist. ~ J.C. Joranco

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written. ~ William Gibson

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

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination. ~ Louise Brooks

… I was constantly trying to shoehorn characters into each other's lives, planting them on street corners or in cafés together so that they could talk. So that they could explain things to each other, from across the great human divide. But it was all so contrived. Contrived and meddlesome, really, because sometimes you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist. If their paths cross and they can teach each other something, fine. If they don't, well, that's interesting, too. Or, if it isn't interesting, then maybe you need to back up and start again. ~ Lisa Halliday

We share a bond. We do everything together. We have a piece of strong, invisible thread connecting us. It's indestructible – it can never be broken. The thread is the key item that links us together. We understand each other. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time. ~ James Van Pelt

Writing is like making a delicious cake. Use the best ingredients, layer the flavors, and finish it with panache. If your product is made with good taste, people will ask for more. ~ Claudia McCants

If we accept the premise that we're always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses ... and tell a good story. ~ James S.A. Corey

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

Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald. ~ James Rollins

The desire to confess ... lies at the root of most fiction writing ... ~ Lucy Poate Stebbins

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow. ~ Orson Scott Card

The joy of reading is in discovery; a good writer creates, "gaps, spaces, and absences," in a richly layered text. He/she creates a desire in the reader to strive for meaning. Paradoxically, the writer guides the reader, but allows them some flexibility to recreate the text, thereby putting their own unique interpretation on what they have read. ~ Suzy Davies

...though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own. And thus, believing, or, at least, hoping, that no Creature can, or will, Envy me for this World of mine, I remain,

Noble Ladies, Your Humble Servant, M. Newcastle. ~ Margaret Cavendish

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand. ~ William Gibson

[Author's Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I'm interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I'm less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important - I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories a ~ Jeanine Cummins

it's the way he uses language - which is nothing like the way fantasists used language before him. There's no sense of nostalgia. There's no medieval floridness. There's no fairy tale condescension to the child reader. It's very straight, and very clean - there's no Vaseline on the lens. You see everything clearly, not with sparkles or a flowery sense of wonderment, but with very specific physical details. ~ Joe Fassler

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written. ~ Robert Hass

This whole show vs tell concept both bewilders and challenges my mind. ~ Davee Jones

Characters are just extensions of my madness. ~ Mark Tilbury

I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

When I was hired by the University of Washington extension school to teach the one-year fiction writing course - 96 classroom hours - I quickly determined that I knew only about an hour's worth off the top of my head. ~ James Thayer

Years ago, when I was about to go on a book tour for Someplace to Be Flying, my editor at the time Terri Windling and I sat down to figure out what to call what I was writing for the interviews that were to come. Terri came up with the term mythic fiction and I think that sums it up perfectly. There are almost invariably mythic elements in my fiction (as well as bits of folk and faerie lore) and the term doesn't lock me into writing only in an urban setting since many of my stories take place in rural areas. It never caught on, but when I don't describe what I do as simply fiction, I'll go with mythic fiction. ~ Charles De Lint

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction. ~ Penelope Lively

We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week. ~ Miguel Ferrer

Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it was for a writer? ~ Dean Koontz

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth. ~ Paul Harding

true fiction is more likely to include what was overlooked or ignored or barely seen or felt at the time of its occurrences but comes continually to mind ten or twenty years afterwards not on account of its having long ago provoked passion or pain but because of its appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime ~ Gerald Murnane

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him. ~ Robert Crais

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Have you lost your mind? What have I told you Charlie about whales? You can't MANHANDLE THEM! ~ Erica Sehyun Song

I like to think I've written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's I Love L.A. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining. ~ Octavia E. Butler

Human life is fiction's only theme. ~ Eudora Welty

It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over.
Houses Under The Sea ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

You know this has really affected my ability to trust myself. No matter what happened in my life, I was always able to trust myself. My instincts. Two men in a row carrying on indiscretions makes me feel like I made up some story. Almost like a fiction, I
wrote in my mind that had a beginning, middle and end. It feels like I manufactured some ideal life that was a made-up invention that I needed to believe was the truth. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work. ~ Alain De Botton

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

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost! ~ Henry James

When you're writing a book that is going to be a narrative with characters and events, you're walking very close to fiction, since you're using some of the methods of fiction writing. You're lying, but some of the details may well come from your general recollection rather than from the particular scene. In the end it comes down to the readers. If they believe you, you're OK. A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing. ~ Samuel Hynes

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.

("Introduction") ~ Francis M. Nevins Jr.

I maintain that cultural sensitivity should be replaced by cultural awareness. Awareness implies research, consideration, thought, and judiciousness ...
Sensitivity denies equal access to language. It segregates and censors based on the background of the writer rather than the content of the story. No society can embrace cultural sensitivity and retain full capacity for freedom of speech. ~ Scott M. Roberts

I long for the day I no longer long for him. ~ Franki Fiori

Family is a permanent adhesive that creates a lifetime bond. ~ Conrad Brooks

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime. ~ Etgar Keret

I tried to appear more normal than I was, so that those around me wouldn't think I was less normal than I was, and that suited them just fine. ~ Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

The growing social consciousness of the Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) can be found throughout the Austen Universe. While the Lady wrote about the gentry, she, none-the-less, was speaking to the human condition. Class is an imaginary distinction conferring no better manners on the "haves" and no lesser nobility on the "have-nots" and that the deepest human emotions are universal. ~ Don Jacobson

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford. ~ Taiye Selasi

I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times. ~ Bill Styron

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. ~ Frederik Pohl

The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict. ~ James Frey

Misunderstandings arise only in undefined relationships ~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can't respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period.

Source: http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/25/ma... ~ Martin Amis

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction. ~ Hallie Ephron

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing - your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal. ~ David Foster Wallace

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot is too much or too little. And there is no better place to find answers than in the Victoria's Secret catalogue--or in any ad for lingerie--where the arts of seduction and revelation are so successfully practiced. After all, the secret of the effective lingerie ad is the secret of effective storytelling--to provide, moment by moment, the illusion of imminent expose, to give the viewer (read: reader) the uncanny sense that something fundamentally compelling is always just about to be revealed. Lingerie ads and storytelling balance the veiled and the unveiled, the seen and the unseen, the shown and the about-to-be-shown. In short, it is the art of the tease, the craft of selective 'coverage,' that, not just in lingerie but in storytelling, works to enthrall. ~ Julie Checkoway

Without a doubt the two best words in the English language are The End ~ Ken Scott

Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. ~ James Wood

Commercial fiction writing – where my bread is buttered – is fairly straightforward. The writing is simply efficiency and story. The more you have of one the less you need of the other. ~ Joe Ducie

Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense ... It's insanity by definition. ~ Jo Beverley

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology. ~ Ruth Ozeki

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction. ~ Alexander Chee

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

Writing - the act of one person giving a piece of their soul to another. ~ J. Spredemann

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

fiction writing can be a blast when you set aside debilitating notions of perfection and just dive headlong into the creative process. ~ Chris Baty

Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart. ~ Linda W. Yezak

Unfortunately, to try to disconnect faith from vision is to do violence to the whole personality, and the whole personality participates in the act of writing. The tensions of being a Catholic novelist are probably never balanced for the writer until the Church becomes so much a part of his personality that he can forget about her - in the same sense that when he writes, he forgets about himself. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Danilo's was the kind of place where many drinking men come to hide, be it from their wives, in-laws, their jobs or life in general. it was where men and women can come to drink poison as if it was the only form of medicine available to remedy the migraine headache called life. The lighting dim and secluded, mostly covering the tables, counters and the door to the bathroom. The walls were decorated in decades of memories, favorite sports teams and other miscellaneous decor that was typical of small bars such as this one. It was too dark to tell what they were from a distance.
There was a thick layer of smoke hovering in the air around the ceiling lights, the place was smothered in it but was strongest above everyone's heads. The smell was the classic stale bar odor of cigarettes and cheap cigars. ~ J.C. Joranco

She snorted in amusement at my remark. "When are the guards going to start to notice?"
Keith peered into the distance. "Starting now, ~ Erica Sehyun Song

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. ~ Joan Didion

Writing is a solitary business. It's just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill. ~ Shannon Celebi

He sent it flying at full speed. It jumped six times as well, sending ripples across the sea. The small splashes of foam turned into miniature rainbows as they caught the light of the evening sun setting behind the clouds. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

I just ... ," Cath started again: "I realized that I'm not cut out for fiction-writing."
Professor Piper blinked and pulled her head back. "What are you talking about? You're exactly cut out for it. You're a Butterick pattern, Cath
this is what you were meant to do. ~ Rainbow Rowell

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing. ~ Maria Semple

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal ~ William H Gass

Good writing should help us see the world in new ways, it should crack open our generosity towards each other. That's what I hope my work does anyway. I want someone to read it and know that they aren't alone in the universe. I want my words to act as connective tissue. ~ Patrick Hicks

If you can read the book and say, 'Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!' That's Military Science Fiction." (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012) ~ Brandon Sanderson

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. ~ Ivana Trump

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction. ~ Rachel Cusk

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions. ~ L.L. Barkat

In writing, there is art. And in art there is craft ... ~ Susi Moore

If creative fiction writing is a process of translating an abstraction into the concrete, there are three possible grades of such writing: translating an old (known) abstraction (theme or thesis) through the medium of old fiction means (that is, characters, events or situations used before for that same purpose, that same translation) -- this is most of the popular trash; translating an old abstraction through new, original fiction means -- this is most of the good literature; creating a new, original abstraction and translating it through new, original means. This, as far as I know, is only me -- my kind of fiction writing. ~ Ayn Rand

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture. ~ Tom Bissell

I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn't room for what I wanted to write. ~ Sara Zarr

There is something so degrading - at least, one would think that there were something so degrading in the practice of writing as a trade - that anyone who has once earned a livelihood, or part of it, obviously and openly, by popular writing, can never be seriously regarded by any great number of people. And then, of course, "he does too much. ~ Ezra Pound

From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment. ~ Garry Disher

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it. ~ Dean Wesley Smith