Scott Westerfeld Quotes

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author's notes to keep my conscience clear.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

I know how to write fiction well.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

If you're a writer, and you write fiction, that's not all you read.

I have a background writing screenplays and teleplays. I've tried to write prose and fiction but never really completed anything I thought worthy of publication or worthy of anyone else to even look at.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

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

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.