Miguel Ferrer Quotes

I've learned things about the craft of writing and about structuring a book and about character development and so on that I've just learned on the fly.

I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

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.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

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.

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

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

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

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

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.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

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.

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

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

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.