Sharon Shinn Quotes

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

All I ever wanted to do is to write stories that people will enjoy and feel at home with.

When I write, it's like watching a movie in my head.

When I read books, I actually really love imagining whomever I want to in the character's role. I get such vivid pictures on my own that that is a big part of the experience for me.

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions.

Picture books are the distillation of an idea, and you have to use just the right words. I love that, and I try to use a lot of action verbs.

I don't put a lot of description in the books because I write books the way I like to read them, and that is I like to build images and be a creative reader, and so I write that way.

I trust the readers to build their own visual images. To me, that's part of the wonder of reading.

The more ways you can tell a story and paint a picture, the better it is.

The key thing if you're a writer is to visualize the scene and convey it to the penciller and turn the penciller loose.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.

I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable.

There are times my stories become - what I feel - not only accessible to hearing me on television, but they make wonderful reading.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.