Chad Harbach Quotes

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.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

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

The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.'

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

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

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.

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.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

I knew from my television work that I could sit down and put words on paper but didn't know if I had the talent to tell a story in novel form.