Jess Walter Quotes

I always wrote. I've written stories since I was 9. We didn't have a computer at home, but my aunt Magda had one. Whenever I'd go to her place, I was in the basement working on her computer, writing stories.

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

I write novels and other things.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

It's just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story. I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want.

I want to write books.

When I write, I never think of segments as chapters; I think of them as scenes. I always visualize them in my mind. Then I try to get the scene down on paper as closely as I can. That's the one thing that readers don't see - what you have in your mind. The reader can only see what you get on the page.

I usually am thinking about my next book the second I put the last dot on the previous one that I turn in.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.