Concise Narrative Quotes

A short story can be packed with meaning and impact, with the concentrated density of a collapsed star, but should preferably also have a kind of elegant simplicity.

It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.

In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

I love to be able to tell a whole story in three-and-half minutes.

I always admire people who do commercials because they have to put together a beginning, a middle, and an end in 30 seconds.

I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.

What I love about [TV] is this: It's a specific thing to be able to tell a satisfying, rewarding story in less than 25 minutes. Not everyone can pull that off. There's something really cool about giving lit people a bunch of little mini movies.

I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.

I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry.

In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.

Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.

They say anything can happen in a short series. I just didn't expect it to be that short.

A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it.

The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku of the story.

I think that one of Tim's great qualities and abilities is in what seems like a thumbnail sketch to get something quite telling, very simply, when you're doing it or being in that thumbnail sketch, you don't feel that it's important.

Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

What I learned most was how to tell a story in 15 seconds or 30 seconds or 60 seconds - to have some kind of goal of what to try to do and make it happen in that time.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

I love writing shorter fiction.

Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.