Writing Fiction Quotes - Page 3

• Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

  Stephen King

  Lonely, Jobs, Ocean

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.210, Simon and Schuster

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• Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Novelists, Fiction

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• About a year after (my stories began being published), magazine editor George Scithers, suggested to me that since I was so new at being published, I must be very close to what I had to learn to move from fooling around with writing to actually producing professional stories. There are a lot of aspiring writers out there who would like to know just that. Write that book.SFWW-I is that book. It's the book I was looking for when I first started writing fiction.

  Barry B. Longyear

  Moving, Book, Writing

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• I was writing fiction steadily, but I found that the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative.

  Vikram Chandra

  Writing, Relief, Fiction

  Vikram Chandra (2013). “Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software”, p.22, Faber & Faber

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• Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

  John Updike

  Writing, Sea, Sailing

  Hugging the Shore foreword (1984)

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• When you're writing fiction it's a heightened voice. You're trying to cast a spell, which isn't the same thing as trying to cast someone into it. You are creating a reality but it's a different sort of performance.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Writing, Reality, Voice

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

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• 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

  Writing, Mind, May

  "Until It Isn’t". Interview with Giuseppe Taurino, americanshortfiction.org. July 15, 2014.

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• Even when it comes to writing fiction, how do you encompass all this stuff that's right on the tip of your tongue? You have to fold that into what you're working on.

  Paul Beatty

  Writing, Fiction, Stuff

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

  Andrew Lam

  Writing, Abstract Painting, Fiction

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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• I didn't lie, I was writing fiction with my mouth.

  Matt Groening

  Lying, Writing, Fiction

  "Fictional Character: Homer Simpson". "In a way, they're all winners: 10 Simpsons episodes from the past 5 seasons that stand among the series' best" by Steve Heisler, Kyle Ryan, and Genevieve Koski, www.avclub.com. March 23, 2009.

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• Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Lying, Writing, Fiction

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• I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

  Alain de Botton

  Writing, Fiction, Uncomfortable

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.

  John Green

  Twilight, Writing, People

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• Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.

  Haruki Murakami

  Memories, Home, Writing

  Haruki Murakami (1994). “The Elephant Vanishes”, Vintage

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• Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.

  Dale Peck

  Writing, Fiction, Irrational

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.

  Ben Lerner

  Writing, Thinking, Self

  Interview with Tao Lin, www.believermag.com. 2014.

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• Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.

  Vito Acconci

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

  Interview with Shelley Jackson, believermag.com. January 1, 2007.

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• Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

  Phil Klay

  Believe, Writing, Character

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• When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

  Margaret Atwood

  Believe, Writing, Fiction

  Margaret Atwood (2006). “Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood”

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• After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Writing, Discovery, Long

  "A Voice in Haiti’s Chorus". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. 2010.

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• I guess it must be a time-of-life thing, looking back and trying to make some sense of who I am and where I've been. It's a weird thing, having to give an account of yourself, to try to make sense of yourself for yourself. I'm not that old, but I have been writing fiction professionally for a long time now. I started so young and went so hard for so long. And I guess it was about feeling I had the space to look over my shoulder.

  Tim Winton

  Writing, Who I Am, Space

  Source: www.readings.com.au

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• Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

  Francine Prose

  Writing, Fiction, Facts

  "Francine Prose on ‘My New American Life’". Interview with Thessaly La Force, www.theparisreview.org. May 13, 2011.

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• Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.

  Nicholas Royle

  Writing, Past, Poetry

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• Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

  Terry Brooks

  Dream, Book, Writing

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• A couple of pieces of advice for the kids who are serious about writing are: first of all, to read everything you can get your hands on so you can become familiar with different forms of writing: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, journalism. That's very important. And also keep a journal. Not so much, because it's good writing practice. Although it is, but more because it's a wonderful source of story starters.

  Ann M. Martin

  Couple, Writing, Kids

  Source: www.glamour.com

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