Orson Scott Card Quotes

I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.

I always write a story in one sitting.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

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

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

It can be difficult workshopping novels because any questions or qualms you have as the author can be like, 'That's next chapter, don't worry about it!' I don't think the workshop is set up so well to do that for novels.

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.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.