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Quotes by Fiction Writer of the Authors - Page 23
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So if there was a way that I knew something about my character's desires or the things that they were resisting because I was saving it for some grand epiphany moment for my readers, I just feel like that's when you can feel the machine at work in a story. That's when you can feel the writer pulling the strings of the puppet.
Molly Antopol
/
Fiction Writer
Character
Desire
Machines
Copy Quote
This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
/
Fiction Writer
Character
Fiction
People
Copy Quote
You look at science fiction and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated about the other. Look at the number of blue people - 'Avatar,' I'm looking at you. And it is now easier to find people of color in science-fiction literature and media, but the issues of representation are still really, really troubling.
Nalo Hopkinson
/
Fiction Writer
Blue
Representation
Science Fiction
Alien
Avatar
Talks
Troubling
Copy Quote
As a kid, I didn't need to be convinced the future promised peril and oppression, so when I started thinking up the middle-grade science fiction novel that became 'The Boy at the End of the World,' it seemed only natural to build the story around a dark vision of the future. In my book, civilization has nearly destroyed itself.
Greg Van Eekhout
/
Fiction Writer
Destroyed
End Of The World
Oppression
Peril
Science Fiction
Nearly
Promised
Copy Quote
I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.
Rosemary Mahoney
/
Fiction Writer
Hardship
Honor
Intrigue
Protest
Real Life
Subjects
Life Best Experience
Useful
Fullest
Portrait
Reconstruct
Useful Thing
Copy Quote
[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly drawn from my own childhood: violence and a loss of innocence. But keep in mind that, as a writer, I'm both the criminal and the victim. I'm not trying to get out of anything easy.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
/
Fiction Writer
Childhood
Loss
Thinking
Copy Quote
The idea that we should write towards the unknown aspects of our experience was totally groundbreaking for me. It gave me the license I needed to try to write outside myself. This attitude has deeply informed my approach to fiction, emboldening me to write characters with voices or situations that are vastly different from my own.
Molly Antopol
/
Fiction Writer
License
Unknown
Aspects
Informed
Vastly
Voices
Copy Quote
The most-asked question when someone describes a novel, movie or short story to a friend probably is, 'How does it end?' Endings carry tremendous weight with readers; if they don't like the ending, chances are they'll say they didn't like the work. Failed endings are also the most common problems editors have with submitted works.
Nancy Kress
/
Fiction Writer
Editors
Short Story
Chances
Tremendous
Ending
Failed
Readers
Submitted
Copy Quote
You have the mainstream bourgeois life of the U.S., Europe, the "developed" world - the life of technology, education, mortgages, careers, a certain level of physical comfort - while on the other hand, several billion people on the planet exist on less than a dollar a day. That's a huge and terrible reality to get your head around.
Ben Fountain
/
Fiction Writer
Technology
Hands
Reality
Copy Quote
Writing is self-reinforcing. Don't make a fetish out of it, and don't surrender to the myth of the garret, or the myth of the chained muse. It's like playing the guitar, or practicing taekwondo, or having sex. The more you do, the better you get. The better you get, the better it feels. The better it feels, the more you want to do.
Jay Lake
/
Fiction Writer
Guitar
Sex
Writing
Copy Quote
It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee.
Ken Macleod
/
Fiction Writer
Long
Opaque
Two
Copy Quote
Other families who are poor do what they can to get out of it. My mother did not. She did not utilise her resources. She had a degree. There was something she could have done, but she actively, purposely refused that so we could have this absolutely authentic experience of the worst of capitalism: 'See? Look how bad capitalism is.'
Said Sayrafiezadeh
/
Fiction Writer
Capitalism
Poor
Resources
Worst
Absolutely
Actively
Authentic
Degree
Families
Purposely
Refused
Copy Quote
It took me a while to get back to 'The Queen of the Night.' I was angry with it as an idea because I felt like it had sort of ruined my life by taking so much attention away from 'Edinburgh.' So it essentially languished in a drawer until 2004, when I pulled it out, dusted it off, and thought, 'Oh, I actually really like this idea.'
Alexander Chee
/
Fiction Writer
Angry
Edinburgh
Ruined
Life Me Night
Life Angry Me
Drawer
Essentially
Queen
Much Attention
Pulled
Copy Quote
Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.
Ben Fountain
/
Fiction Writer
Exceptional
Gains
Mobility
Numbers
Phenomenon
Rising
Standards
Upward Mobility
Achieved
Classes
Masse
Peaked
Sharply
Upward
Copy Quote
People are going to bash you. You get rejected. It's hard. I don't really feel like that's my place as the teacher. I think the most important thing is to figure out what they're trying to do and turn them onto writers who are doing similar stuff. I think that's something I can do more than anything else: get them to be big readers.
Molly Antopol
/
Fiction Writer
Teacher
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
I sometimes have to write for a while before I figure it out, pretend that I know what I'm doing, sort of like ad-libbing on stage until you remember your line - you hope you sound convincing to the audience. The key is to have enough material, enough threads, so that there's something that can be satisfyingly drawn to a conclusion.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
/
Fiction Writer
Keys
Sound
Writing
Copy Quote
Fifty or sixty shooters had already arrived and managed to look studiously bored. I knew a few of them and nodded politely. No one asked me to sit next to them, nor would I have accepted if they had. It's better that way, in case you end up on opposite sides of a fight, and a whole lot safer. Friends can betray you. Strangers can't.
William C. Dietz
/
Fiction Writer
Friendship
Betrayal
Fighting
Copy Quote
Back in 1982, when there were still only a manageable number of 'X-Men' titles on the racks (by which I mean just one), Marvel quite reasonably figured the world could stand another team of beleaguered mutant superheroes. And so were born 'The New Mutants,' junior X-Men whose powers had just begun to manifest at the onset of puberty.
Greg Van Eekhout
/
Fiction Writer
Just One
Manageable
Puberty
Titles
Begun
Figured
Junior
Marvel
Mutant
Powers
Reasonably
Superheroes
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I knew I wanted the parties in 'The Queen of the Night' to be convincing, beautiful, and also dramatic: situations where significant things happened on a scale that was both grand and intimate. There were several texts that helped me think about how to do this, and one of the most important ones was Charlotte Bronte's novel 'Villette.'
Alexander Chee
/
Fiction Writer
Charlotte
Convincing
Dramatic
Intimate
Significant
Scale
Grand
Queen
Parties
Situations
Texts
Copy Quote
The 'Grace of Kings' begins as a very dark, complicated world filled with injustices - among them the oppressed position of women - but gradually transforms into something better through a series of revolutions. But since real social change takes a long time, even by the end of the book, only the seeds of deep change have been planted.
Ken Liu
/
Fiction Writer
Book
Complicated
Dark
Filled
Grace
Long Time
Oppressed
Position
Seeds
Series
Social
Social Change
Time Change Women
Revolutions
Since
Among
Begins
Change Time Women
Gradually
Injustices
Planted
Takes
Copy Quote
Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position.
Nancy Kress
/
Fiction Writer
Building Blocks
Paragraph
Blocks
Everything Else
Exact
Generate
Phrase
Right Word
Sentence
Copy Quote
The daily quota I've set for myself is 500 words or approximately a page and a half double-spaced. Which isn't much, except that I'm extremely slow, extremely meticulous. 'Le mot juste' haunts me. On a good day, I will finally secrete the 500th word at about 5 o'clock, and I'll reward myself by going to Housing Works Bookstore to read.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
/
Fiction Writer
Good Day
Housing
Meticulous
Quota
Approximately
Bookstore
Daily
Haunts
Page
Slow
Reward
Copy Quote
Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.
Alexander Chee
/
Fiction Writer
Book
Memorable
Reading
Copy Quote
My sister married an American and took his name, and my brother has shortened Sayrafiezadeh to Sayraf. So now he's Jacob Sayraf, or sometimes Jake Sayraf. He made the change when he was a teenager, prior to the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. So I don't think it was motivated by any anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
/
Fiction Writer
Sister
Brother
Crisis
Hostage
Iranian
Jacob
Married
Motivated
Revolution
Teenager
United States
Sentiment
Prior
Shortened
Copy Quote
To me, the remarkable thing is it's pretty much unanimous the way blind people have been perceived in all cultures and for millennia. The first is, if they can't see, they must be stupid. The second one is, and this is a very old one, that blindness is such a terrible thing that it must be a curse from God for some evil that you committed.
Rosemary Mahoney
/
Fiction Writer
Blind
Blindness
Committed
Curse
Remarkable
Cultures
Millennia
Old One
Perceived
Terrible Thing
Unanimous
Copy Quote
It's rare that I'm able to get to my desk in the morning without stopping halfway there, turning around, and going in the opposite direction because of a pressing need to straighten all the pictures on the walls, floss my teeth a second time, and make certain that there really are 100 postage stamps in the roll of stamps I bought yesterday.
Rosemary Mahoney
/
Fiction Writer
Halfway
Postage
Stamps
Stopping
Teeth
Yesterday
Opposite
Bought
Rare
Turning
Desk
Opposite Direction
Pressing
Straighten
Walls
Copy Quote
I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I've wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well, I guess, or I wouldn't have done it. The day it's too difficult for me, I guess I'll stop.
Rosemary Mahoney
/
Fiction Writer
Controversial
Time Me Day
Confident
Time Enough Done
First Place
Wasted
Oddly
Worrying
Copy Quote
I have no personal experience in the military. All I know about it is what I've seen in movies and read in books and watched on television. My knowledge is probably no more or no less than the average person's. 'A Brief Encounter with the Enemy' was created by taking bits and pieces from here and there, and then putting my own spin on them.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
/
Fiction Writer
Knowledge
Average
Bits
Bits And Pieces
Enemy
Military
My Own
Television
Books
Seen
Less
Brief
Watched
Read
Encounter
Personal
Personal Experience
Putting
Spin
Taking
There And Then
Copy Quote
I'm trying mostly to ask questions. And not just trying to stake out a position on something, but also trying to define the stuff we agree on. I'm having battles with comment posters trying to insert a little sense of order so it's not just a long pissing match between the edges, which is what I think a lot of the blogosphere is tending to do.
Andrew Revkin
/
Fiction Writer
Long
Order
Thinking
Copy Quote
The Gilded Age robber barons - the Goulds, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and Rockefellers - did quite well under laissez-faire. Most of the rest of Americans were still stuck in the ditch, with little to no economic security, life expectancy of roughly 45 years, and horrific infant mortality rates that claimed 300 babies per 1,000 in the cities.
Ben Fountain
/
Fiction Writer
Age
Cities
Economic
Economic Security
Expectancy
Gilded
Horrific
Infant
Infant Mortality
Life Expectancy
Mortality
Security
Stuck
Years
Little
Quite
Did
Babies
Claimed
Ditch
Rest
Per
Well
Rates
Robber
Roughly
Copy Quote
Your opening should give the reader a person to focus on. In a short story, this person should turn up almost immediately; he should be integral to the story's main action; he should be an individual, not just a type. In a novel, the main character may take longer to appear: Anna Karenina doesn't show up in her own novel until chapter eighteen.
Nancy Kress
/
Fiction Writer
Anna
Eighteen
Opening
Reader
Short Story
Appear
Chapter
Immediately
Integral
Main Character
Copy Quote
In the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you'd hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far braying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves.
Tom Franklin
/
Fiction Writer
Blue
Dog
Squirrels
Copy Quote
The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.
Alexander Chee
/
Fiction Writer
Beauty
Blue
Coast
Dark
Forests
Maine
Moved
Occasional
Return
Sand
Stillness
Vivid
Water
Now
Almost
Away
Beaches
Becomes
Clearly
Each
Flashes
Pine
Rocky
Somehow
While
Copy Quote
People who are ambitious - politicians who crave power - think that they're in control of it, but at some point, the movement that they started overtakes them, and they lose the ability to direct things anymore, and they become essentially riders on a wild stallion, and wherever the movement goes, wherever power takes them, they have to go along.
Ken Liu
/
Fiction Writer
Ability
Ambitious
Crave
Direct
Movement
Riders
Anymore
Wild
Politicians
Essentially
Goes
Power Control People
Lose
Point
Takes
Wherever
Copy Quote
Democracy's premise rests on the notion that the collective wisdom of the majority will prove right more often than it's wrong; that given sufficient opportunity in the pursuit of happiness, your population will develop its talents, its intellect, its better judgment; that over time its capacity for discernment and self-correction will be enlarged.
Ben Fountain
/
Fiction Writer
Wisdom
Capacity
Democracy
Discernment
Intellect
Judgment
Majority
Notion
Population
Prove
Pursuit
Pursuit Of Happiness
Sufficient
Collective
Talents
Develop
Rests
Premise
Copy Quote
As both an essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist, I write about and for the future. I talk about the past to remind us that what we believe has always been true - that men and women are somehow static categories, or that men in power has always been the default, or that same-sex love affairs were always taboo - has not always been thus.
Kameron Hurley
/
Fiction Writer
Categories
Default
Men And Women
Static
Taboo
Love Future Science
Affairs
Essayist
Remind
Same-Sex
Thus
Copy Quote
I was trying to hold up a mirror to this country, to reflect the past years or so, and the varying degrees in which we've been affected by the war(s) that doesn't seem to end. And we've all been affected somehow, even if we have no connection to the military, even if we don't know anyone who's killed or been killed. No one escapes something so large.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
/
Fiction Writer
War
Country
Military
Copy Quote
I'm a writer, not an editor, and though the editing rarely cut into my writing time, it did take away from that walking-around-thinking-about-it-when-you're-not-thinking-about-it time that I think is important for writers. When you're half-thinking about what you're working on while driving, cooking . . . just letting things sift and settle, come to you.
Ben Fountain
/
Fiction Writer
Cutting
Thinking
Writing
Copy Quote
Whenever women have made any social gains, whether it's being accepted as athletes or moving into the professions, it's going to be contradicted with an image of woman as small, diminished, reduced, brought back to a childish body. The result is that a lot of extraordinary power is going to be diverted into making oneself smaller than one is meant to be.
Kim Chernin
/
Fiction Writer
Athlete
Moving
Weight
Copy Quote
Before Bin Laden did everything but advertise. Yet he had to blow up the Twin Towers just to get the attention of anyone outside the intelligence community. So what did we do? We invaded the wrong country, killed the wrong madman, and too often used the wrong interrogation techniques on the wrong people-all because our leaders lost contact with the truth.
Richard North Patterson
/
Fiction Writer
Blow
Country
Interrogation Techniques
Copy Quote
I felt like if I could get the epiphany out of the way in my drafting process, through my eighth or tenth draft, then that can just be part of how I've assembled the character, and then we can move on and move forward with it. In general, I don't ever want to feel smarter than my characters, because I just feel like that's not a great way to write a story.
Molly Antopol
/
Fiction Writer
Character
Moving
Writing
Copy Quote
At what age did I start to think that where I was going was more important than where I already was? When was it that I began to believe that the most important thing about what I was doing was getting it over with? Knowing how to live is not something we have to teach children. Knowing how to live is something we have to be careful not to take away from them.
Colin Beavan
/
Fiction Writer
Believe
Children
Thinking
Copy Quote
Now our world is at the present time firmly in the grip of a mechanical monster, whose head - if you want to call it that - is the World Engineer's Complex. That monster is opposed to us and can keep all too good a tab on us through every purchase we make with our credit numbers, every time we use the public transportation or eat a meal or rent a place to live.
Gordon R. Dickson
/
Fiction Writer
Numbers
Our World
Use
Copy Quote
For many years I wrote nothing but "I will not sleep with Steve Almond" over and over again, page after page à la Jack Torrance in The Shining. Finally, hundreds of psychotherapy sessions and an intense shaman-guided DMT sweat lodge experience led to a breakthrough, and I was able to write about other people I would not sleep with, and also about people I would.
Alissa Nutting
/
Fiction Writer
Sleep
Writing
Years
Copy Quote
I've got a number of stories written so far in that mythos, more lined up to be written, and a narrative arc taking shape between them. I was experimenting with releasing the stories online for Paypal donations, so the existing ones are currently available via the blog for free download, but the ball didn't keep rolling in terms of meeting the targets I was setting.
Hal Duncan
/
Fiction Writer
Balls
Numbers
Rolling
Copy Quote
We like to look for patterns and find connections in unrelated events. This way we can explain them to ourselves. Life seems neater, or at least less messy. We need to feel we are in control: it is integral to our self-esteem. We also know, though we deny it, that we are not in control. So we settle for the illusions of control. What if we stopped fooling ourselves?
Jessica Zafra
/
Fiction Writer
Patterns
Self Esteem
What If
Copy Quote
I hear what many of you are saying: We don’t have the time, we are busy. Well Nobody Has Time, Everyone Is Busy. In the time it took you to read this post, your life just got a minute shorter. That is precisely why we read (and why some of us write): because life is short and finite, we want more, and literature is the distillation of all those lives we will not lead.
Jessica Zafra
/
Fiction Writer
Life Is Short
Want
Writing
Copy Quote
It was just such a complete shock to turn on the news one day and see someone that you know, someone you have passed in the halls of your high school. It got me thinking, 'Well, what are some novels that are about female sexual psychopaths? I really didn't have many references for that, and I felt like that was a void in transgressive literature that I wanted to fill.'
Alissa Nutting
/
Fiction Writer
One Day
School
Thinking
Copy Quote
I always tell my students to write the story all the way through, not to play with the language and fall in love with sentences that you then have to cut. I actually find that really difficult to do; there's something so demoralizing about looking at a pile of not very great sentences. As I ease into writing every morning, I tweak a sentence and then tweak a paragraph.
Molly Antopol
/
Fiction Writer
Morning
Falling In Love
Writing
Copy Quote
With the Holocaust - I wonder if a lot of Jewish writers of my generation have felt this way - it feels really intimidating to approach it. I feel like so many writers who have either lived through it firsthand or were part of that generation where they were closer to the people who were in it have written so beautifully about it, so there's no lack of great books about it
Molly Antopol
/
Fiction Writer
Book
Holocaust
People
Copy Quote
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