426 Quotes About Writing-craft

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.

This whole show vs tell concept both bewilders and challenges my mind.

..el instinto poético es impotente por si solo (...) El estudio paciente (...) y la meditación profunda (...) son quienes desenvuelven los gérmenes del ingenio y llevan por un camino mas largo, es cierto, pero mas seguro, a las eminencias en que la mente encuentra sin esfuerzo la fórmula genuina y la imagen sensible de su pensamiento.

Storytellers don't show, they tell. I'm sticking with that.

The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, he’d mused, that most people will never find their ‘call me Ishmael’.

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.

Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much?

A good part of the physical attraction [between the hero and heroine of a romance novel] comes to life during these exchanges as well, since language creates a meeting of the minds. I have long thought that these lines of dialogue carve out the lines of the central love relationship. The dialogue between the hero and heroine creates the central shape of the story. It is the verbal sculpture.