Darin Strauss Quotes

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I was an actor for a little bit. That's when I started to understand fiction - and that one of the great things about fiction is that you're dependent on the characters as much as they're dependent on you.