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I researched fiction writing for months before I taught my first class, much of it looking for strong techniques from bestselling authors.
Sep 10, 2025
Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.
The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
Fiction writing feels more honest to me.
Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.
First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.
Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.
I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.
The first time I took a fiction writing class was sophomore year. And I just found myself taking that extremely seriously, in a way that I didn't take anything else seriously. So I guess that was the start of it.
Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it.
Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.
My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.
Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.
Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.
I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.
I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.
A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonists taste in music, or were told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.
Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds.
When I was in high school and college, my other real focus was, actually, fiction writing. So in college, I had done all these seminars with these various writers-in-residence.
This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.
Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
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.
If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.
In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over.
Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.
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.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader's desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That's called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax.
Fantasy doesn't have to be fantastic. American writers in particular find this much harder to grasp. You need to have your feet on the ground as much as your head in the clouds. The cute dragon that sits on your shoulder also craps all down your back, but this makes it more interesting because it gives it an added dimension.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.