Gene Wolfe Quotes

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

You know what? I wanna play something that is really... it changes the game. I don't wanna be the same story where it's the Charles Bronson formula, where he's getting revenge or whatever.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

It is expected that a children's story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding that one forgets what exactly the difficulty was.

What makes a story a story is that something changes. Internal, external, small or large, trivial or of earth-shattering importance. Doesn't matter.

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 started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

Every movie is wildly different. So many of the problems are the same, but they take on different guises.

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

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.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

It's always good to have a story arch.

Storytelling is storytelling. Good stories need compelling characters and interesting conflicts. That's the bottom line no matter what medium you're writing for.

On a TV show, you don't know where the character is going.

A standard sitcom... is a very standard idea, like these people falling in love and living with each other, and all these people living with each other. It's like, okay, we hooked them up in episode 15, how do we bust that, how do we find a new kernel in it?

These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.

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.

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

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.