Khaled Hosseini Quotes

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I write both fiction and nonfiction. I begin my fiction with the main character. The story comes later.

My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.

I'm very interested in storytelling and anything that plays with structure.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all.

When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.

I never believed I could write anything. No way - write a whole story? Figuring out all that plotting and symbolism? How do you foreshadow things?

I know a lot of people in the business recommend the many Story Structure seminars being offered here, but I point to them as the single biggest contributor to lousy scripts.

For me, the first thing is to tell a good story.

It's really, always, the story and the characters that come first, and the other things are kind of dealt with in time or, in fact, driven by the story.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

My advice is that it's easier to write than direct. If you have an interest in writing, write. You might as well start with yourself or some event you know well, and you need a point of view.

I read a handful of memoirs to get a sense of what the genre meant. I needed to learn the fundamentals of the craft. I had never written a word of narrative. What is a tense shift, what is point of view? I didn't know any of it.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

Of course, I'm not allowed to talk about the script, but I can say it is a really good story.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

Writing a great script - not just a good one, but a great one - is almost an impossible task.