Story Writing Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about Story Writing.

Quotes About Story Writing

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The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points. ~ Iris Johansen
Story Writing quotes by Iris Johansen
A story is about a single moment in a character's life when a definitive choice is made, after which nothing is the same. ~ John L'Heureux
Story Writing quotes by John L'Heureux
If you are present, then you can see that you give yourself presents in each moment that you can unwrap and thoroughly enjoy - the amazing world around us that we can explore, each incredible detail, the lives, and the stories we tell ourselves or experience so that we can feel what it's like to be human, the things we can learn from an interaction, about ourselves as well as everything and everyone else.

Everyone is here in their own story, writing the script as they go, living the movie picture.... choosing who to meet, what to do, how to react to each new experience. We each find our own tools to help us traverse the terrain of each particular part of our journeys. It cannot be right to judge another, or yourself, for we are all at different stages, or on different stages. We do as we need to according to where and how we find ourselves, but the more you realise that you actually put yourself exactly where you are in each moment, the more your eyes will widen. You are an amazing Being playing the game of life - your attitude makes all the difference. ~ Jay Woodman
Story Writing quotes by Jay Woodman
Sometimes ... it takes me an entire day to write a recipe, to communicate it correctly. It's really like writing a little short story. ~ Julia Child
Story Writing quotes by Julia Child
I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode. ~ George Saunders
Story Writing quotes by George Saunders
It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story. ~ Edna Ferber
Story Writing quotes by Edna Ferber
Everything that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story. ~ Tapani Bagge
Story Writing quotes by Tapani Bagge
Write your story before it dies one single breath at time. Nobody cares if is the truth as long as it really happened. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose
Story Writing quotes by Brenda Sutton Rose
Writing is always a process of discovery - I never know the end,or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There is a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story. ~ Kim Edwards
Story Writing quotes by Kim Edwards
If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever. ~ Jodi Picoult
Story Writing quotes by Jodi Picoult
In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers. ~ Pat Conroy
Story Writing quotes by Pat Conroy
Being a writer is a good, good thing. ~ Shannon Hale
Story Writing quotes by Shannon Hale
I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story. ~ George R R Martin
Story Writing quotes by George R R Martin
Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. ~ F.K. Preston
Story Writing quotes by F.K. Preston
A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument ... and the occasional bar fight. ~ J. Michael Straczynski
Story Writing quotes by J. Michael Straczynski
It's a distillation of all I know about writing: short-story writing, screenwriting, journalism - everything. There is no future in the novel, so far as I can see. I'm trying to show where writing is going to be. I may not get there, but I will point the way." In ~ Gerald Clarke
Story Writing quotes by Gerald Clarke
I write movies, so - I look at boxing, and I commentated on it, as if I were telling you the story of a movie or a short story. ~ Ferdie Pacheco
Story Writing quotes by Ferdie Pacheco
A story unwritten is without beginning or end. But in its potential lies another story; and in the heartbeat before pen meets page, both stories exist at once, reflecting endless permutations of the other, before one of them disappears forever. ~ Nenia Campbell
Story Writing quotes by Nenia Campbell
It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story. ~ Frank Yerby
Story Writing quotes by Frank Yerby
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are. ~ Flannery O'Connor
Story Writing quotes by Flannery O'Connor
Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story. ~ Michael Martone
Story Writing quotes by Michael Martone
Overall, I was generally "delighted" with the book's story -- writing, theme, plot, etc. Seriously, though, I really did revel in it. After all, "what is a book for if not for our enjoyment? ~ Chris Mentillo
Story Writing quotes by Chris Mentillo
I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story. ~ Ron Carlson
Story Writing quotes by Ron Carlson
We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don't usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I'm saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place. ~ Lydia Davis
Story Writing quotes by Lydia Davis
Nothing good about this but it's title. A priggish little yarn. And Hidden Riches is not a story
it's a machine. It creaks. It never made me forget for one instant that it was a story. Hence it isn't a story. ~ L.M. Montgomery
Story Writing quotes by L.M. Montgomery
Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences. ~ Anne McCaffrey
Story Writing quotes by Anne McCaffrey
Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald
Story Writing quotes by F Scott Fitzgerald
I am content when writing short stories. ~ Sarah Mazucci
Story Writing quotes by Sarah Mazucci
Improvise. Write your own damn story. ~ Eric Lange
Story Writing quotes by Eric Lange
Story should be a descent
the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down. ~ Chuck Wendig
Story Writing quotes by Chuck Wendig
I write most of my first drafts on an old manual typewriter, a really old one. It's a big black metal "Woodstock" from about 1920. I try to write everything down at once, in one sitting. The longer stories in this collection are divided up into sections. Each section represents a different sitting, a different idea for the same story. ~ Arthur Bradford
Story Writing quotes by Arthur Bradford
The truth is there isn't anything to me at all. All I know is that I can't sleep well, I can't dream well and I'm quite in love with you. That's all there is to me. My greatest feature is my admiration for you. I know it's not healthy. Like my insomnia. Like my dreamless nights. You make living alright. My nightmares come when I think of a night without Valeria. That's when I realise you're dead. That's when I remember you've been gone for years. That's when I remember I'm awake. And I wait for this dream called Life to leave me to my peace once and for all and forever. ~ F.K. Preston
Story Writing quotes by F.K. Preston
Where do they go, these dreams of mine? Do they live? Do they die? Do they fall? Do they fly? ~ F.K. Preston
Story Writing quotes by F.K. Preston
Can you imagine a world without books to read? ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Story Writing quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
Nobody cooks using just one ingredient. Why would you write using just one flavor of story? ~ Patrick Rothfuss
Story Writing quotes by Patrick Rothfuss
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself. ~ Julio Cortazar
Story Writing quotes by Julio Cortazar
We write to share the deepest heart-talk of our souls. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Story Writing quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
There have been numerous times I have not brought up my case because I do not want to upset anybody or spoil the mood. Because I want to preserve your comfort...You will find society asking you for the happy ending, saying come back when you're better, when what you say can make us feel good, when you have something more uplifting, affirming.

...I've found that victims identify more with pain than platitudes. When I write about weakness, about how I am barely getting through this, my hope is that they feel better, because it aligns with the truth they are living...I write because the most healing words I have been given are It's okay not to be okay... ~ Chanel Miller
Story Writing quotes by Chanel Miller
My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us. ~ Emma Thompson
Story Writing quotes by Emma Thompson
Writing Tip:
Don't let the "writing rules" bog you down when you're writing the first draft; they don't matter when you're writing the story, only when you're editing the story. ~ Linda Westphal
Story Writing quotes by Linda Westphal
I should walk away. That would be the right thing to do. It would be the smart thing. But I can't, because I'm Taylor Caldwell, the girl who cuts. ~ S. Elle Cameron
Story Writing quotes by S. Elle Cameron
I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you're too busy living. ~ F.K. Preston
Story Writing quotes by F.K. Preston
Story, it turns out, is the assassin of despair. ~ Robin Cody
Story Writing quotes by Robin Cody
I think the tendency to over-explain and over describe is one of the most common failings in fantasy. It's an unfortunate piece of Tolkien's legacy. Don't get me wrong, Tolkien was a great worldbuilder, but he got a little caught up describing his world at times, at the expense of the overall story. ~ Patrick Rothfuss
Story Writing quotes by Patrick Rothfuss
For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true. ~ John Green
Story Writing quotes by John Green
Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story. ~ Stephen King
Story Writing quotes by Stephen King
Write what you love. Passion is the key to a good story. ~ R.M. Donaldson
Story Writing quotes by R.M. Donaldson
Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery. Writing fiction, for me, is about putting on paper my obsessive interest in something mysterious. I may figure out the source of the mystery, the things that brought some action or image to my mind, but to make an equation of it would ruin the story. ~ Antonya Nelson
Story Writing quotes by Antonya Nelson
You have to live your story before being able to write your story. ~ Amy Shearn
Story Writing quotes by Amy Shearn
Every time I write about life, I must kill and eat the actual event. I mean to say that my words are scavengers who need to devour lifeless substance if they are to survive as non-fiction. The event is dead, it ceased to be as soon as it happened. The closest I can come to resurrecting the past is to feed my memories to a ravenous swarm of sentences, punctuation and paragraphs. They chew up and digest the things I remember, producing a waste product I think of as an honest account. Reality suffers a second death through this process. False memories, both organic and manufactured, erase the genuine article in order to reassemble the factors into a serviceable construct. True story. ~ Alex Bosworth
Story Writing quotes by Alex Bosworth
My creativity keeps me from starving. Humanity keeps my life mundane. Loving secures my love for life, but my imagination keeps me sane. ~ F.K. Preston
Story Writing quotes by F.K. Preston
Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story. ~ Eudora Welty
Story Writing quotes by Eudora Welty
MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps All
REALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time ~ Lisa Cron
Story Writing quotes by Lisa Cron
I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, Just as long as he finishes the book. ~ Roald Dahl
Story Writing quotes by Roald Dahl
I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck. ~ Robert Sheckley
Story Writing quotes by Robert Sheckley
And it's just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there's no overlap. ~ Jandy Nelson
Story Writing quotes by Jandy Nelson
All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience. ~ F.K. Preston
Story Writing quotes by F.K. Preston
I wanted to give you something that would last forever. Something that would surpass the world, that would still be alive and bright even after you passed away. Something beautiful. For your eyes and smile only. But I never found it. All I could give you is words. Words which were as fleeting as the heartbeats that shook my soul whenever you looked my way. ~ F.K. Preston
Story Writing quotes by F.K. Preston
I'm writing a new love story, set in eastern North Carolina. Surprise, surprise, huh? ~ Nicholas Sparks
Story Writing quotes by Nicholas Sparks
The challenge of the writer is to transform - artistically and imaginatively - a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story. ~ Hillel F. Damron
Story Writing quotes by Hillel F. Damron
But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Story Writing quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough
Story Writing quotes by Craig D. Lounsbrough
Whatever else I know, I know that if you invest love and care in any individual you can help them to make a difference, to write their own life story. ~ Michael Gove
Story Writing quotes by Michael Gove
When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. ~ Stephen King
Story Writing quotes by Stephen King
I do write fiction, and I find it more difficult, but also more liberating. On the one hand, you can make up the story, but you have to make up the story. ~ Emily Susan Rapp
Story Writing quotes by Emily Susan Rapp
I knew little about short story writing then so it was rough going, but I did find the experience very memorable. ~ Haruki Murakami
Story Writing quotes by Haruki Murakami
I wish I could run into the world's arms. Linger within the spaces between nothing. I wish I could filter out of existence. To live quietly without dying. I wish I could be cherished by life itself. To speak and sing volumes without lying to myself. ~ F.K. Preston
Story Writing quotes by F.K. Preston
Honestly, I don't know what I would recommend from this story. Perhaps it is this: if you have the choice to laugh or do nothing, you might as well laugh. ~ F.K. Preston
Story Writing quotes by F.K. Preston
When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story. ~ Stephen King
Story Writing quotes by Stephen King
For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe. ~ Julio Cortazar
Story Writing quotes by Julio Cortazar
An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop. ~ Chris Everheart
Story Writing quotes by Chris Everheart
Writing a story is like giving birth with the only difference that you enjoy the process. ~ Self
Story Writing quotes by Self
I would say plotting is the most difficult thing for me. Characterization is only hard because sometimes I feel I get so interested in it that I want to talk too much about the characters and that slows the story down. So I say, "Hey, people want to find out what's going to happen next, they don't want to listen to you spout off about this or that person." But I think even the bad guy deserves to tell his side of the story. ~ Stephen King
Story Writing quotes by Stephen King
A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders ... and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy
writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that? ~ Cynthia Ozick
Story Writing quotes by Cynthia Ozick
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story. ~ Karen Blixen
Story Writing quotes by Karen Blixen
I made many decisions, some awful and others brilliant, but I found ways to keep that openness in my soul that meant more to me than breathing. I told them over the years what I was doing, how I was trying what no one in my family had ever tried to do. When I was failing, I admitted that as well, and they listened politely. I also knew that's all they could do. One lonely night in Connecticut, I pulled myself from a window's ledge. No one else next to me. Another day I chose to do something someone like me should have never accomplished, and yet I did, and kept going. I learned to recognize when others, like Jean, were much better than me, because they had faith in my soul. I believed in very little, but I kept going until I would get tired or defeated, and then I would take time to discover another wall to throw myself at. I was, and I am, and I will be, a peculiar kind of immigrant's son. I got old, and that made everything better, including me. ~ Sergio Troncoso
Story Writing quotes by Sergio Troncoso
In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all. ~ Samuel R. Delany
Story Writing quotes by Samuel R. Delany
A photographer is like a writer ... you're writing with your lens so make sure you tell a good story. ~ Habib Umar Bin Hafiz
Story Writing quotes by Habib Umar Bin Hafiz
When you write a story, don't just write it - live it;
When putting words into the mouth of a protagonist (or any character) imagine yourself saying them and while writing about the reaction of the listener, write it the way you would react.
Let the conversations not be meant merely to be read but felt as well.
If you do not feel what you write; how can you expect the readers to feel it? ~ Arti Honrao
Story Writing quotes by Arti Honrao
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary - it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences. ~ W. Somerset Maugham
Story Writing quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest. ~ Stephen King
Story Writing quotes by Stephen King
And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends. ~ Fish
Story Writing quotes by Fish
Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with:
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing ...
Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He. ~ Saadat Hasan Manto
Story Writing quotes by Saadat Hasan Manto
What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking
Story Writing quotes by Billy Marshall Stoneking
I believe ghost story writing is a dying art. ~ H.R. Wakefield
Story Writing quotes by H.R. Wakefield
For the last 20 years of my life, I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects, so I'm attracted to good story, writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change. ~ John Hawkes
Story Writing quotes by John Hawkes
Lies of omission do not exist. The concept is a very human one. It is the product of your story writing again. You have written a story about the truth, making emotional demands of it, and in particular, of those in possession of it. Your demands are based on a feeling of entitlement to the facts, which is very childish. You can never know all of the facts. Only I can. And since it's impossible for me to reveal all facts to you, it is my discretion alone that decides which facts will be revealed in the finite time we have. If I do not volunteer information you deem critical to your fate, it possibly means that I am a scoundrel, but it does not mean that I am a liar. And it certainly means you did not ask the right questions.
One can make either true statements or false statements about reality. All of the statements I make are true. ~ Scratch
Story Writing quotes by Scratch
I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Story Writing quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer
But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.
The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story. ~ Katharine Weber
Story Writing quotes by Katharine Weber
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. ~ John Steinbeck
Story Writing quotes by John Steinbeck
Rewriting is the crucible where books are born. ~ Cathryn Louis
Story Writing quotes by Cathryn Louis
Your passion as an artist is a magnet that draws you at all times, but if you don't follow, it will suffocate your heart. ~ Pawan Mishra
Story Writing quotes by Pawan Mishra
I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Story Writing quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The best time to tell your story is when you have to tell your story. When it's not really a choice. But then, when you get that first, messy, complicated version down, you have to read it over and be very tough on yourself and ask, 'Well what's the story here?' If you're lucky enough to have someone you trust looking over your shoulder, he or she can help you if [you] lack perspective on your own story. ~ Jeannette Walls
Story Writing quotes by Jeannette Walls
I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2. ~ O. Henry
Story Writing quotes by O. Henry
I'm a plotter. A thinker, a note-maker, a mapper and a flow-charter. I'm up for using any device that will teach me more about the people I'm writing about and their story. ~ Nick Earls
Story Writing quotes by Nick Earls
Come with me to the mountains. Every rock there tells a story. ~ Avijeet Das
Story Writing quotes by Avijeet Das
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Story Writing quotes by Edgar Allan Poe
I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story. ~ Lucy Hale
Story Writing quotes by Lucy Hale
I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, "Tarzan and the Lost Empire", there are 31 books on my list. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs
Story Writing quotes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
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