George Saunders Quotes

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on - because the reader certainly will.

I hate being bored when I read a story. Even a well-trod theme can be made fresh by a different perspective or fresh writing.

It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.

I follow only one rule in my writing, and that is to be interesting. If the story is interesting to you, the writer, then it will probably be interesting to somebody else.

While I'm writing, I'm also the first reader, and I want to write a book where I'm excited about what happens next.

It's always very important to me to try to create a story that feels unpredictable. You can't jump ahead and see what's coming, but at the end, when you've watched the whole thing, it all feels inevitable.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

I don't ignore continuity, and try my best to stick as closely to the current status quo as possible, but it's not my primary concern when I start a story.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it.

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.

I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.

My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling.

Rex Stout's narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing.

Comics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller.

If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.

I like to end stories where the readers have a little room to run. They can resolve things as they like in their own mind.

Chronology can be dangerous. You can get so linear that it becomes robotic for the reader.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Long fiction is wonderful and you can lose yourself in it as a reader and as a writer, but short stories don't allow the same kind of immersion. Often the best stories hold you back and make you witness them. This may be one of the reasons some people reject the form. That and the fact that they are harder work to read. A story will not let you get comfortable and settle in. It is like a stool that is so small that you must always be aware of sitting.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.