Authorial Craft Quotes

Read! Read! Read! And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.

Don't think about how your characters sound, but how they see. Watch the world through their eyes - study the extraordinary and the mundane through their particular perspective. Walk around the block with them, stroll the rooms they live in, figure out what objects on the cluttered dining room table they would inevitably stare at the longest, and then learn why.

Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty. More concerned with what is put than how it is put, she also understood that you only say anything at all when you say it well.

I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote 'The Sun Also Rises' 39 times.

To the composition of novels and romances, nothing is necessary but paper, pens, and ink, with the manual capacity of using them.

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

I was thinking about the difference in voice between the different characters. Each voice has to be unique. Hypothetically you should be able to read each chapter without the heading that tells you who is telling the story.

I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

Getting inside your character's head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can't be duplicated in any other medium.

I think everything you do, characters I always find, have their own voices and once you establish who that character is you find a different voice. I think it's just a question of establishing that character and the voice speaks through that character.