Walter Jon Williams Quotes

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

When you're given the assignment to write, for example, 'Spider-Man,' the concept, characters and environment are all laid out for you. Everything is pre-established, and your sole responsibility as a creator is to craft an exciting, entertaining, hopefully original adventure, to add layers and colors to a canon that already exists.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

It's all about letting the story take over.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

I love the idea of real-life experiences finding their way into fiction. I think that's really cool.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

When you talk about fantasy, the usual problem is that whilst you've got the world of imagination, there are no controlling forces.

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

I like going back and writing fiction.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I think the plasticity of the novel is its greatest challenge. There are no rules; there is no necessary form. You can know what you want it to be, or do, and still not know how to write it. There are endless possibilities, infinite choices. What voice should it be in? What events to start with? What characters will be part of it?