182 Quotes About Novel-writing

True writers know that writing is not something they feel required to do,or to make a living they must do, it is quite frankly like breathing. Somecan breathe often and fluently, some short breaths, some a long exhaleand for many of us it is the patient steady breathing surrounding life.

Las dos categorías mentales básicas son el espacio y el tiempo. El espacio es la categoría feliz: uno vive, camina, respira, ama, come en el espacio; el tiempo, en cambio, es la categoría triste porque es donde envejecemos, morimos. Y creo que hay una literatura -la vieja novela, por ejemplo- que creaba esos grandes escenarios donde uno se podía evadir. Ahora ha sido reemplazada por una literatura del tiempo, más triste. Todo es autoficción, que es contar vidas...

An aspiring writer should write one time and edit ten times.

Writing is like building a house with bricks; you can set your story up anyway you want, one word at a time, and finally when you’re done you invite someone in.

You don’t have to be around long to understand the world is a frightening place, that life includes situations you have no control over, that anything can happen. Everybody needs friends and a family.

only a handful of pregnant women are like Emily; that is, they go to the hospital with pain and get the surprise of their life by delivering a child. Using Emily’s least-favorite math term, decimals, the number would be 0.0004 percent of all U.S. births. About fifteen hundred surprise babies a year.

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed--he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

When writing a novel, the only real constraint is how far you want to go with your ideas. With movie scripts, you have time and budgetary constraints. For example, if your screenplay is set entirely at night, you've just doubled the cost of the movie. Novels can indulge all five senses, but Film is a visual medium that usurps the novelist's tool of narration through voice-over to add depth and perspective.

Novel writing, I’ve discovered, is the most liberating. You can write the narrative in the past, present, or future, and from any viewpoint or philosophy, including your own. The only keeper you answer to is your own creativity. It’s total autonomy.