Amy Hempel Quotes

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.

I fundamentally believe that no one can teach you how to write - finding out how to write a story is part of the process of creating a story - but you can really learn through exposure to different writing, to different art forms, to different modes of storytelling, and with mentors who are able to get you to step outside your comfort zone.

Fiction writing and journalism, in my experience, are really excellent training grounds for each other.

What one's goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.

Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.

I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

I used to write in school a lot; I always liked it and used to write on my own, comic books, come up with alternate story lines to the stuff I watched and read, a lot of books and TV, episodes of 'Twilight Zone.' I didn't think about it.

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I've learned it doesn't get easier each time. It actually gets harder.

Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.

I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.

I have always enjoyed literature classes, and I took a fiction workshop for writing and analyzing at Curtis... I don't know if would do it professionally, but it's nice to have the balance with the music.

The fact that I had spent so many years doing media criticism and thinking really seriously about theme and structure did definitely help. Doing that for several years indirectly built a lot of tools that I would end up using when writing my own fiction.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.