Herbert Bayard Swope Quotes

Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.

The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

The short form, for those people who can master it - and I am by no means one of them - it is very admirable, because it is really hard to tell stories that can stick with the audience and still be between 5 and 30 minutes long. I think it's a real challenge.

Writing for children is my... that's my medium, you know, and the medium is the picture book, which is a very particular kind of book. I try to give children what I would give anybody, you know. I become interested in something. I find something fascinating. It has to fascinate me, and then I want to give it to them.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

I write. This is what I do. My job is to sit down with my vocabulary, select words, and decide what order they should be placed in an attempt to keep someone's attention and perhaps provide them with a laugh or two along the way.

Sometimes a writer just needs a hook.

I write short stories. I write every day.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.

I don't like to write rhetorically or get on a soapbox. I try to make the stuff multi-layered, so that it always has a life outside its social context. I don't believe that you can tell people anything; you can only draw them in.

Pacing has become more important than ever, largely because of other media. I've always tried to start my stories out with a bang, something that will hook their attention.

For me, writing for kids is harder because they're a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid's not going to do that. They will drop the book.

Novels often have leisurely openings; a TV drama needs an arresting opening.

When I begin to write a story, I usually know how things will end. It's the journey toward that point I must discover. The process is sometimes painful, but also exciting.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.

And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.

It makes it harder to write if I watch a lot of television, because television is not like a written story.

All writers know how important a good title is. It's the first thing readers see, along with a knock-your-socks-off cover - a seductive 'come hither' for the story within.

I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells.

Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.

When I started to be a writer, I was not going to run the risk of boring you.

The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.

I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn't end, I'll go to a French movie. That's a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself; it can't just build off the first one or play variations.

Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.