Dakota State University
Madison, SD, USA
Creative Writing: Fiction
Quotations from Writers
Tom Clancy
John Gardner
"Spending a lifetime writing novels is hard enough to justify in any case, but spending a lifetime writing novels nobody wants is much harder."
". . . if one tries to write for nobody, only for some pure and unearthly ideal of aesthetic perfection, one is apt to lose heart."
"If he's capable of writing expressively, at least sometimes, and if his love for language is not so exclusive or obsessive as to rule out all other interests, one feels the young writer has a chance. The better the writer's feel for language and its limits, the better his odds become."
"Detail is the lifeblood of fiction."
Sarah Harrison
"The various acquired skills which make up the craft of writing are all useful tools - but writing is also an art, not to mention a passion. The tools are not the thing itself. The best writing has at its heart a spark of individual creativity, an X-factor which makes it unique and cannot, thank God, be taught. A gifted editor once told me that what she most looked for in a new writer was 'the glint of obsession'."
"Never, never be condescending towards your audience."
"First and foremost you must have a wonderful, unstoppable story and powerful characters."
"I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers' circles and at summer schools, and I'm continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarcely read. For ideas to germinate and proliferate there has to be fertile ground to sow them in, and for the ground to be fertile it must be mulched with observation, imagination, and other writing."
"But fluency and brilliance are not the purpose of the writing. The story is."
"You are writing fiction. Fiction is an illusion. The moment you speak as the author you rupture the illusion, and upset the delicate balance between storyteller and story-reader. The only place where this is acceptable is in first-person narrative where the narrator is also a character in her own right."
"Writing is a solitary process relying on self-motivation."
"Story first."
Stephen King (On Writing, Pocket Books, 2000.)
"I think that yours [writing toolbox] should have at least four [levels]. ... Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary. . . . You'll also want grammar on the top shelf of your toolbox. . . . On the layer beneath go . . . elements of style.[as in Strunk and White's Elements of Style]. . . but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic."
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut."
"You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you."
"The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing... It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn't, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor."
"In terms of genre, it's probably fair to assume that you will begin by writing what you love to read."
"What would be very wrong, I think, is to turn away from what you know and like... in favor of things you believe will impress your friends, relatives, and writing-circle colleagues. What's equally wrong is the deliberate turning toward some genre or type of fiction in order to make money. It's morally wonky, for one thing - the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story's web of lies, not to commit intellectual dishonesty in the hunt for the buck. Also, brothers and sisters, it doesn't work."
"In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech. You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer - my answer, anyway - is nowhere."
"I want to put a group of characters ... in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free."
"When you step away from the 'write what you know' rule, research becomes inevitable, and it can add a lot to your story. Just don't end up with the tail wagging the dog; remember that you are writing a novel, not a research paper. The story always comes first."
James A. Michener
"I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation."
"Writing is never completed till it's published. . . . One starts a novel with the implicit understanding that the end product is a book that another person can acquire, hold, read and enjoy. . . . By published I not only mean the issuing of the printer version of a manuscript but also mean the circulation of the manuscript among one's peers."
"In selecting themes for my big books, I have had but one goal: to write a book that I myself would like to read, and to do it on a topic that will have more than passing interest."
"I have tried every device I know to breathe life into my characters, for there is little in fiction more rewarding than to see real people interact on a page. How the writer achieves such a result remains a mystery, but sometimes it happens, and when it does, it is a wonderful thing."
"I hope that this time I will be able to hold all the threads together, that the characters will evoke a sense of reality, that what I've written will elucidate the theme, than an occasional paragraph will sing, that I can, in a phrase I learned in England, 'bring it off.' This, I believe, is the constant ambition of the writer and his constant prayer."
"I sometimes wonder when I read what even knowledgeable people say about writers and writing if they have any conception of what the life of a writer is like, especially if his or her books achieve wide circulation in many languages. What they don't know might include: a visit to the dentist when people from six surrounding offices come with their books to be signed; the letters that arrive daily thanking you for books that changed the letterwriters' lives; the startling experience of walking to the rear of an airplane to exercise your bad legs and finding six or seven people reading your novels, and often ones published a quarter of a century ago; the warming contact with people who love books and who are endeavoring to entice their children to read, too, by testing them with one of yours; and the knock on the door from a group of neighbors: 'We heard you were in town. We have almost all your books- would you please sign them?'"
David Poyer
"I see a writer's ability as standing on three legs, like the tripods Homer speaks of as being dedicated to the gods. Talent, experience, and literary background. Add to these the container that holds the flame: determination."
"The single most important thing you ought to do is read."
"Last year, beginning writers wasted 1.2 million hours being depressed by rejections and difficulties. Worse yet, they gave up without really giving it all they had. Because they got discouraged. I recommend you adopt the Rule of 32. That is, beginners get 32 free failures. That's the price of learning the job. Only after 32 rejections, insults, bad novels, misfired short stories, do you get to start counting."
"Development is the sweaty part of writing. This is what separates the writer from the onlooker, the person who is always going to write a novel 'some day' from the one who in fact does. It's wearying. It's dull. It's not nearly as much fun as the research. It is hard. It takes a long time."
Annie Proulx
For me the strongest influences are the varied landscapes and bare ground of the hinterlands, rough weather and rural people living lives in the pincers of damaging isolation, ingrained localisms, and the economic decisions made by distant urban powers. The rush, for me, comes from the effort to put these lives on paper, and through them examine the society that draws the lines.
I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language, the specialized phrases and names that have come out of human work and travel through the landscapes.
When I write, I try to make landscapes rise from the page, to appear in the camera lens of the reader's mind. The reader is also an absent presence, but one that's leaning a sharp and influential elbow on my shoulder.
Nora Roberts
"Well, it takes [to write a romance novel]-- it takes a good story teller, first and foremost. Romance writing isn't different from any other sort of popular fiction in that-- plot, narrative setting, dialogue-- everything has to be there. You have to have good, interesting, strong characters."
"One of the best perks of being a writer is becoming-- for the time it takes to write the book-- someone else. To write well, you have to climb inside someone else's skin and personality. In Daring to Dream, I got to become gorgeous and glamorous and gutsy Margo Sullivan. Not a bad deal."
Gore Vidal
"As every author- and every reader- knows, writing well is the best trip of them all."
Other Sources
Quotations About Writing and Publishing, excerpted from The Quotable Writer by William A. Gordon
Writing Tips and Advice, David Poyer.
URL: http://homepages.dsu.edu/jankej/writing/quotes.htm
Page Manager: Jim Janke
Contact at: jim.janke@dsu.edu
Last update: January 3, 2008