Jay Asher Quotes

It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

My story is very long. And for somebody to write a good story, one needs a good writer, too.

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.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

You just write about things that happen.

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.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.

If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.

I always pity people who have to write my plot synopses.

You've got to think of fun stories, and if the fun story happened to have a lesson, that's a great thing. If you build a movie around a lesson, you're in real trouble.

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.

But basically, I'm trying to write a fun story.

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.