Leigh Michaels Quotes

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty - but life, for me, is a violent thing.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

I love sitting at my desk and facing a quiet day with a pen in my hand, and putting myself into a story. It's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, to absent myself from real life and make up stories is strange, but I started doing this when I was ten years old. It was all I wanted to do.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.

When I write for kids, I have to make sure they know what can't happen. They have to know it's a fantasy. But when I write for adults, they have to think it's real. Every detail has to be real or they won't buy it.

Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

I needed my life as a springboard for my fiction. I have to have something solid under my feet when I write. I'm not a fantasist. I bounce up and down on the diving board, and I go into the water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout.

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

Returning to writing fiction after 13 years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It's what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It's how I got my start as a writer.

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.

I've had that situation where I start writing somebody really miserable, and in order to make the story come alive, I have to give them a vote of confidence, make him vulnerable or wounded. But in real life, you often meet people who, in that particular moment, actually shouldn't get a vote of confidence.

There are two magic acts I want to pull off when I write. One is creating a feeling that when you're inside a book, you believe everything you're reading even when you know it's not true. And the second is an extension of that, which is you know it's not true, you know it's not real, but you believe it anyway. And it's that believing of the story that isn't real that attracted me to writing and storytelling in general.

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

In real life, things don't all end at the nice same place. To keep the story real, there has to be kind of a ragged edge at the end of a novel.