fiction crafting Quotes

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

I would spend my time telling stories or writing them.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

There is no story unless you've written it.

For me, the pleasure of writing comes with inventing stories.

I never get sick of writing my own stories because there's a certain comfort in knowing you will never run out of material. It's relaxing, actually, to write.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

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.

I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn't think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16.

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.

I started writing stories when I was 9 or 10. I wrote my first screenplay-type document when I was 14.

I lack the skill to hold a story line for the length required for a novel or even a short story. I have never had an idea that could withstand a hundred thousand words, or even ten thousand words of rubber meeting the road.

I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.