James Buchan Quotes

There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word—tension—has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end—is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?

Sometimes you read something and it's just -- it doesn't invite a reader....Sometimes you read something and it's not saying, 'oh come in, come in have a seat. I'm going to tell you what happened.' Perhaps my writing comes off as conversational...and that takes effort.

Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

I like to think that I get better and better as a writer, but it seems pretty easy to me to slip on disguises of various people.

No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.

I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.

The only place where you can really surprise or shock the reader, or make someone laugh, is on the lower righthand corner - the very last panel - so as you turn the page, the payoff is in the upper lefthand panel. To pace every story so that there's a setup and a payoff at the page turn was a huge challenge; it's a part of the medium and you really have to learn what can be done in the medium.

Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.

I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.

You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

Humor is important for is pacing. If your whole book is just drama drama drama, it's going to wear down the reader.

On a more technical level, a story takes a lot of words. And to generate words and phrases and images and so on, that will compel the reader to continue reading - that stand a chance of really grabbing a reader - the writer has to work out of a place of, let's say, familiarity and affection. The matrix of the story has to be made out of stuff the writer really knows about and likes. The writer can't be stretching and (purely) inventing all the time. Well, I can't, anyway.

All authors to their own defects are blind.

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.

The important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in your ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk.

I'm a better writer now because I've worked very hard at getting better. My long-range goal will always be to write better books.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

No matter what you write, it's a matter of putting words in a certain order so that the reader will be interested in what you're writing.

Humor is necessary - it allows the reader to come up for air before dunking them under again. I need humor and I need it on the page to keep the reader going.