Billy Collins Quotes

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

It's nice to know when you're a part of a story, it's nice to know at least something about the beginning, middle, and end.

Listen to great storytellers; slowly, you will learn about voice, timing, tension, structure, climax - all the things you need to tell stories that will capture the imagination of your audience.

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

Everything you write makes you better. But if you really need a tip, here's one: a good story begins in opposition to its ending. That means you work out how it finishes first, and then begin the story as far away from that point - in terms of character development - as you can.

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

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

We're constantly trying to find the best way to tell the stories that we want.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.

The shouting and opinion and jokes don't exist if there isn't first a story.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

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

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

Unless the story line carries the scenes, the scenes don't really mean anything.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.