Fiction writing Quotes

“Commercial fiction writing – where my bread is buttered – is fairly straightforward. The writing is simply efficiency and story. The more you have of one the less you need of the other.”

“I gave up worrying about the principles of fiction writing when I realized that there weren't any.”

“When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.”

“Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.”

“People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.”

“Given that media has become fast-paced, readers now want books that show the action and don’t just tell you what is happening. Modern readers don’t want three pages of descriptions of a farmhouse. They want to hear the door’s creak quiet the chirping of crickets out in the cornfield, they want to feel the cool air drift through the house, then they want to see the shadow of a man, gun drawn, standing over the bed of his disloyal lover.”

“Audiences are craving intricate and intelligent stories that keep them on the edge of their seats.”

“You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.”

“My favourite authors are John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer. Grisham rapidly established himself and now completely owns the legal space of fiction writing, something I want to do in financial space. I like Archer because he keeps his readers engaged: every chapter is a page turner, and he keeps his writing simple.”