Kim Young-ha Quotes

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

I am not, at heart, a playwright.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.

I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.