83 Quotes by Nancy Kress

The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

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.

The reader is going to imprint on the characters he sees first. He is going to expect to see these people often, to have them figure largely into the story, possibly to care about them. Usually, this will be the protagonist.

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

Conflict drives fiction; no one wants to read a four-hundred-page novel in which everything rolls along smoothly.

Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.

The process, not the results, have to be the reason a writer writes. Otherwise, creating a four-hundred-page novel is just too daunting a task.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.