Tim O'Brien Quotes

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.

Lastly get emotionally connected to your story so you can deliver it, you know, if you can't deliver the emotions to your script there's no point to your story. Story is the key.

Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.

Things happen to all of us. The writer's job is to get you interested.

Writers write for one reason: to create an emotion in the reader, to reach across and make them feel something. You want a reaction. Yeah, it's nicer when the reaction is to throw flowers than it is to throw brickbats, but you have to accept both equally.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I can be so blown away by story lines.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

I try to write stories that are thrilling and full of mystery and funny all at the same time, stories that raise moral questions but come up with very few moral answers, stories that emotionally touch readers through the characters.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

Listen to great storytellers; slowly, you will learn about voice, timing, tension, structure, climax - all the things you need to tell stories that will capture the imagination of your audience.

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.

After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell - in fact, more all the time.

Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an 'Airedale,' not just a 'dog.' A taste should not be merely 'good' but 'creamy and sweet' or 'sharply salty' or 'buttery on the tongue.'

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

The important thing is the storytelling and having a script that makes you feel you're living and breathing through the characters.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.