Darin Strauss Quotes

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.

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

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done.