Author's Skill Quotes

Mindi Scott has a real talent for getting inside her protagonist's head. She sketches out Coley's story in grand swathes, and then paints in all the little details, so that you feel as though you are enmeshed in Coley's brain: thinking her thoughts, feeling her confusion, anger, and, in the end, pain. I just don't think it's possible to read this book and not identify with Coley in some way.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

'Mystic River' just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

A first book often has enough material in it for half a dozen.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

I've never been a fast writer.

I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.

It just happens I write fast and always have done.

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

Given my extensive background in foreign banks, writing about them came quite naturally to me. Thankfully, God has been kind to me.

I am baffled by good writing.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Dialogue that is written in dialect is very tiring to read. If you can do it brilliantly, fine. If other writers read your work and rave about your use of dialect, go for it. But be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read short stories or novels that are written in dialect. It makes our necks feel funny.

MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.

There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.

The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.

Jill Eisenstadt is a writer of many admirable gifts. Foremost among them are a sharp eye for people, a playful love of language, and, it's probably safe to assume, nearly boundless energy.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry and 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author's writing.

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

Dialogue is what I like doing. It's what I am good at doing.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.