Story Writers Quotes

If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all.

It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

To survive, you must tell stories.

Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details.

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart.

Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.

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.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical.

And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

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.

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible.

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

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

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block;

the problem is idea block. When I find myself frozen-whether I'm working on a brief passage in a novel or brainstorming about an entire book-it's usually because I'm trying to shoehorn an idea into the passage or story where it has no place.

I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

Life isn’t happening to you; life is responding to you. Life is your call! Every area of your life is your call. You are the creator of your life. You are the writer of your life story. You are the director of your life movie. You decide what your life will be – by what you give out.

From a really young age, I was reading like a writer.

I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.

For me, being a writer was never a choice.

I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

I love telling stories. I love the intimacy between the writer and reader. When you write sketches it's over in two minutes. When you write a book the characters have to have a bit of emotional depth.

I thought some of the stories were neat;

I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.

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.