Fiction Writing Quotes
The best sayings about Fiction Writing that you can share on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and other social networks!
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A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
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Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
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The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.
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I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.
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Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.
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The desire to confess ... lies at the root of most fiction writing.
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Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
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Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
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Fantasy doesn't have to be fantastic. American writers in particular find this much harder to grasp. You need to have your feet on the ground as much as your head in the clouds. The cute dragon that sits on your shoulder also craps all down your back, but this makes it more interesting because it gives it an added dimension.
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It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
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What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.
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I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.
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I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
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When I was in high school and college, my other real focus was, actually, fiction writing. So in college, I had done all these seminars with these various writers-in-residence.
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People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.
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Fiction writing feels more honest to me.
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You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
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Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.
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Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
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Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.
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I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
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Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them.
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Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.
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The professions of novelist and journalist are very separate. As a novelist, you are ultimately working for yourself. Yes, you need the approval of a publisher and an audience, but what is valued in fiction writing - style, individual voice, insight - is scorned by the editor who is combing through your newspaper article.
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First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.
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You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.
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Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.
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Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.
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Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.
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Top Authors
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Eric Metcalf American football player -
Emily Doskow Author
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Eric Ambler Author -
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Eric Trump Businessman -
Elvin Jones Drummer -
Eric Rohmer Film director -
Eric Lubbock, 4th Baron Avebury Hereditary peer -
Elizabeth Jagger Model -
Emmanuel Jal Musician -
Erin Burnett News anchor -
Elizabeth Benedict Novelist -
Elizabeth Peyton Painter -
Eric Allin Cornell Physicist -
Elizabeth Riddell Poet -
Elmer Diktonius Poet -
Enver Hoxha Political leader -
Elizabeth Joan Smith Politician
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Erin Crocker Race car driver -
Ellis Singer-songwriter
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Ella Henderson Singer-songwriter -
Elodie Yung Television actress -
Erica Tazel Theatre actor -
Elizabeth Wurtzel Writer -
Ella Maillart Writer
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