Darin Strauss Quotes

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

I have the 'thing' worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.

Traditional fiction has a little bit of spatial exploration but is basically a question of time - the question is, what happens next?

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

It's nice to know when you're a part of a story, it's nice to know at least something about the beginning, middle, and end.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

It's always good to have a story arch.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.

When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'

The point about a great story is that it's got a beginning, a middle and end.

Use plot to buttress a story.

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

The author always knows more than the reader does at the start of a novel, and gradually, they share that knowledge with the reader - that's storytelling.

It's a cliche, and in a way it's a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

When you're telling taut, tight storytelling that has any kind of built-in plot twist elements, you tend to want to stack everything up on top of itself as opposed to letting things breathe and be languid in terms of the passage of time.

They were a very good form for me - the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to - and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have.