Ethan Canin Quotes

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

When I first read the script a few years ago I thought it was one of the best written scripts I had ever read.

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.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

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.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.

I know how to write fiction well.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

I might not write fiction in the literary sense. But I write very well. My characters are good. My dialogue is good. And my stories are really involving.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

I feel like I know how to write plot.

I knew from my television work that I could sit down and put words on paper but didn't know if I had the talent to tell a story in novel form.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

Like most art forms, writing is part instinct and part craft. The craft part is the part that can be taught, and that can make a crucial difference to lots of writers.

In school, I used to write scripts and all that good stuff.

Some of our best writers are self taught. Screenwriting is a combo of craft and art. The craft part can be taught, about how to be visual and economical with scenes. However, finally it's the individuality of the writer that will come into play.

I never took a writing class.

My stories often begin with a situation or character rather than an insight about the human condition. It's always been difficult for me to write from an abstract idea, no matter how interesting or compelling I feel the idea might be.

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.