Daniel Alarcon Quotes

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

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

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.

It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

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

I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author's notes to keep my conscience clear.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

I know how to write fiction well.

After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don't really know what you're doing.

A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

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.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

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

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I can't write a novel without first really doing reporting. I don't even call it research; it's reporting. That process is very important to the granularity of my writing. I have to know what the reality is so I can be more convincing in the writing.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.

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.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.