Elizabeth McCracken Quotes

I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I've learned it doesn't get easier each time. It actually gets harder.

I know now why I stopped writing short stories. It was at the point when I recognised how difficult they were.

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

Writing is the beast unto itself.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.

Really, I've worked my whole adult life at fiction, to try and write fiction.

I said to Ruth Rendell, 'When you've written as many books as you have, it's easier.' She said, 'No dear, it gets harder'.

If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.

I have a hard time writing, and I usually have to put a timer at my desk and put it on for an hour. But I love to illustrate, and I can hardly stop myself.

I enjoyed writing for someone else's voice, but I wasn't very good at it.

I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.

Try writing a book, dude. That's difficult.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had - but it's worth it.

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.