Jed Mercurio Quotes

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

The fact that I had spent so many years doing media criticism and thinking really seriously about theme and structure did definitely help. Doing that for several years indirectly built a lot of tools that I would end up using when writing my own fiction.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.

I am a writer. Being critical is a writer's responsibility.

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.

I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there.

I read a lot of bad scripts and weird television shows. I don't know. There's a lot of work out there I was reading at 14 years old and noticing this lack of thought. And then, reading 'Afterschool,' that's full of thought. It was bursting with ideas.

I'm actually quite critical of the storytelling theme. I think all the storytellers are not storytellers.

It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

I'm not accomplished enough to over-analyze something, because I don't have the background as far as people who write and know how to break down a character or story and stuff. I mostly go by gut instincts.

I think that one thing about teaching is you're trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don't respond to in fiction.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

It's hard to make a book episodic.

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

Jane's stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them.