Fiction Writing Quotes

I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.

A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

I researched fiction writing for months before I taught my first class, much of it looking for strong techniques from bestselling authors.

I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

For me, writing plays is far more an act of the mind than of the emotions. It's a very different kind of impulse than fiction writing.

Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

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.

The desire to confess ... lies at the root of most fiction writing.

I have to say that writing about my writing process is more daunting than writing non-fiction.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

The twentieth century saw a professionalization of fiction writing, particularly in its second half and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world - not so much mainland Europe, for example.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

I would write light entertainment nonfiction pieces during the day, then come home and work on my fantasy fiction. It was very difficult to get out of the one mindset and into another one.

I'm not a literary writer who is wedded to notions of realism and fiction. I believe that you can write anything if you can feel it convincingly.

It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.

I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.

I've always loved sister stories in fiction, from the time I was little, reading about Beezus and Ramona. I've always wanted to write a sister story.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.

Because I write realistic fiction, I generally don't think about fixing anyone - I just think about how I want to feel at the end of the book - And I try to write toward that feeling.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing.

The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.

Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.

To be perfectly frank: I don't write women's fiction. I write intimate, gritty, realistic, character-driven fiction that happens to be thrown into the women's fiction category.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form.

I don't go out of my way to write Weird Fiction, or in any other genre. Some of my stuff easily slips into the Weird slot.

The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.

As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics.

I believe that all fiction is personal and all writing is at some level personal.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

Somebody once said to me if you want to be understood, don't write fiction.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish.

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.

You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.