Story Writers Quotes - Page 2

• The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

  John Y. Campbell

  Home, Writing, Simple

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• Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.

  Orson Scott Card

  Writing, Past, Ideas

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• In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.

  L. Sprague de Camp

  Writing, Character, Details

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• All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Matter, Stories

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• Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

  William Wordsworth

  Life, Beauty, Beautiful

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Ernest De Selincourt, Alan G. Hill, Chester Linn Shaver (1967). “The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Volume VIII. A Supplement of New Letters”, p.51, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Story writers say that love is concerned only with young people, and the excitement and glamour of romance end at the altar. How blind they are. The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before.

  Irving Stone

  Inspirational, Love Is, People

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• For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.

  Carol Bly

  Writing, Stories, Combination

  Carol Bly (1990). “The passionate, accurate story: making your heart's truth into literature”

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• Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing.... Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He.

  Saadat Hasan Manto

  Art, Lying, Writing

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• 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.

  Orson Scott Card

  Writing, Impact, Essentials

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• I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers.

  Matthew Healy

  Mean, Imagination, Orbit

  Source: blog.superstitionreview.asu.edu

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• If this "critical openminded attitude" ... is wanted, the question at once arises, Is it science that should be studied in order to achieve it? Why not study law? A judge has to do everything that a scientist is exhorted to do in the way of withholding judgment until all the facts are in, and then judging impartially on the merits of the case as well as he can. ... Why not a course in Sherlock Holmes? The detectives, or at least the detective-story writers, join with the scientists in excoriating "dogmatic prejudice, lying, falsification of facts, and data, and willful fallacious reasoning."

  Anthony Standen

  Attitude, Lying, Science

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• One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind.

  Larry Howes

  Meaningful, Inspiration, Successful

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• Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.

  Will Eisner

  Real, War, Reading

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• Well, as a short-story writer, I don't think there are any weaknesses to the genre itself. I guess I would say that the difficulty of the form is that one must create an entire world in five to 30 pages, as opposed to 300. There is very little room for fat - you must be economical. And you must begin as close to the end as you possibly can.

  ZZ Packer

  Writing, Thinking, Weakness

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• Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

  Nell Freudenberger

  Writing, Character, Long

  "Off the Page: Nell Freudenberger". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.washingtonpost.com. December 12, 2007.

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• I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.

  Chad Harbach

  Mean, People, Support

  "Universities Gain Power In Literary World". Interview with Audie Cornish, www.npr.org. December 12, 2010.

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• It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

  Tobias Wolff

  Time, Past, People

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• Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can't turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can't write a story that's got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You've got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life-that's the stimulant for a story writer.

  O. Henry

  Real, Writing, Thinking

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• My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

  Terry Brooks

  Adventure, Europe, Names

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• My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever

  Irwin Shaw

  Stories, My Favorite, Short Story

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• In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

  Annie Proulx

  House, Insightful, Novelists

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• So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.

  John Fante

  Thieves, Genius, Stories

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• A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

  Lynn Abbey

  Writing, Intuition, Stories

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• I write very raw, ugly, illiterate first drafts very quickly (novels are always in first draft in under a year) and then I spend years and years fine-tuning, revising, editing, etc. What inspires me? Who knows. I am not inspired that much. That’s why I write long form fiction - I am not much of a short story writer. Ideas come seldom, but when a good one comes, I really stick to it and see it out. I’m a problem-solver - I've never thrown out an entire manuscript; I've always forced myself to repair it until it was a lovable thing again.

  Porochista Khakpour

  Writing, Editing, Years

  "Beyond Diaspora: Porochista Khakpour". Interview with Roxanne Naseem Rashedi, lareviewofbooks.org. February 17, 2013.

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• The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.

  Carol Bly

  Together, Stories, Short Story

  Carol Bly (1990). “The passionate, accurate story: making your heart's truth into literature”

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