Ethan Canin Quotes

If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if I can write it; otherwise, I won't want to.

A one-hundred-thousand-word novel might take a year or several years, and then you just come to 'The End' one day. But it takes hundreds of days to get to 'The End.' As a writer, you have to put in those hundreds of days.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?

No ideas are harmed in the making of my books, by the way. All I do with my best ideas is run with them, fast as I can, taking notes and occasionally suggesting a left hand turn rather than the right hand one which might have taken us both over a precipice.

The thing I like so much about short stories is that there isn't as much of an investment of time so I'm free to experiment more. If it doesn't work out, I've only lost a week or two of work. If I screw up a novel I've lost at least a year's worth of work. But the nice thing is that those experiments with short stories can be carried over to novels when the experiments do work.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

I like writing my own stuff. If a book came along I would maybe do that.

I think that if you've got 5 million people that enjoy drama and invest in characters, you must take the time to not worry about your job and getting sacked and just go for it and hit it again.

I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.

Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.

I always say when you write a book, you're a 'one-man band.' Whereas, when you finish a screenplay, it's just a sketch.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication.