Short Form Writing Quotes

Magazine articles are the new books.

At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.

You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.

The challenges of writing a book are very different from writing a blog or tweets. I've been writing a blog since I was in the 6th grade, so I had this style of writing that was definitely not proper for writing a book.

I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.

I've seen people twitter in haiku only.

I do see an interest in writing for Twitter.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling.

Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.

I think '300 Arguments' is a real tiny wallop of a book. It looks very slim, and at first, each little two-sentence or one-sentence thing kind of stands on its own, but again, as you read it, you get sucked into the momentum of it, and the whole of it is much larger than the sum of its parts in a really beautiful way.

Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.

The short form, for those people who can master it - and I am by no means one of them - it is very admirable, because it is really hard to tell stories that can stick with the audience and still be between 5 and 30 minutes long. I think it's a real challenge.

A text conversation is a short exchange of often grossly truncated language that corresponds to a thought made all the more shallow by the process.

When I create and write for TV, I build universes that will have arcs lasting seasons, whereas theatre allows me to explore storylines that will open up for two hours or less. Both are wonderfully fulfilling, but they couldn't be more different.

My sweet spot as a writer and, especially, as an essayist is sub-1500 words.

The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.

In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.

With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.

You can tell a lot in shorthand.

For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.

Blog culture has a hard time digesting narratives, but it has an easy time digesting 'big ideas' pieces.

One danger, when you're writing lots of quick, opinionated blog items about the latest developments, is that you never get around to stating fully, in one place, what you think about a particular topic.

It's almost better that Twitter limits me to 140 characters. There's only so much trouble I can get in.