Writing Fiction Quotes - Page 7

• I don't think writing fiction has changed my worldview.

  Donald Ray Pollock

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it's like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.

  George Saunders

  Mother, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found out in a lot of small ways that that wasn't the case. It's sort of a mixed blessing. My mind is like a puppy. It goes all over. I guess writing fiction was a way of harnessing that. I could hook a puppy up to a treadmill and get something out of it.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Kids, Blessing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I guess it must be a time-of-life thing, looking back and trying to make some sense of who I am and where I've been. It's a weird thing, having to give an account of yourself, to try to make sense of yourself for yourself. I'm not that old, but I have been writing fiction professionally for a long time now. I started so young and went so hard for so long. And I guess it was about feeling I had the space to look over my shoulder.

  Tim Winton

  Writing, Who I Am, Space

  Source: www.readings.com.au

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• I love the resource of the Internet. I use it all the time. Anything I'm writing - for example, if I'm writing a scene about Washington D.C. and I want to know where this monument is, I can find it right away, I can get a picture of the monument, it just makes your life so much easier, especially if you're writing fiction. You can check stuff so much quicker, and I think that's all great for writers.

  Dave Barry

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

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• Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I love writing fiction. It allows me to leave my existence and inhabit other lives.

  Danielle Trussoni

  Writing, Fiction, Pleasure

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

  John Irving

  Writing, People, Degrees

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I came to fantasy fairly late. For some ten years, I had been happily writing fiction and non-fiction for adults. But I always loved fantasy, whether for adults or young people; and at that particular point in my life, I wanted to try it, to understand it, as part of the process of learning to be a writer. The results were beyond anything I could have foreseen. As I've said often and elsewhere, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Writing, Years, People

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

  Neil Gaiman

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Neil Gaiman (2002). “Adventures in the Dream Trade”, N E S F A Press

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• writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Writing, Fiction, Best Things

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• Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Fiction, Down And

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• I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

  Judith Krantz

  Fun, Writing, Creative Nonfiction

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• Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

  Hilma Wolitzer

  Lonely, Fun, Loneliness

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• If you're writing fiction, you're dealing with characters who, themselves, will have heartfelt sentiments but who, themselves, live in this culture right now and thus face all the impediments to sort of dealing with those parts of their lives that, you know, that we did. So it would be not only silly but unrealistic to have a character saying that kind of stuff.

  David Foster Wallace

  Silly, Writing, Character

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

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• When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Color, Water

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

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• In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

  Aravind Adiga

  Reading, Writing, Trying

  "MoJo Interview: Aravind Adiga". Interview with Sonja Sharp, www.motherjones.com. June 19, 2009.

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