Elizabeth McCracken Quotes

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.