Literary Conventions Quotes

If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations.

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.

It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.

Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.

There are a lot of experimental novels that test the boundaries of what the novel is, and 'Conversations' is not one of those. It's conventional in its structure, even though its prose style and the themes it explores and the politics that underpin it, maybe, are on the experimental side. Its basic structure is pretty conventional.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century.

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

That prose is a verse, and verse is a prose; convincing all, by demonstrating plain – poetic souls delight in prose insane

Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom

The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope. The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

I had a lot of issues with the genre, and I probably even had issues with the whole idea of genre. I was coming into it with a certain degree of outsider attitude, and I didn't have a long-term plan. But I think the way it's worked out, it's sort of warped into what I suppose you could say is my own genre. If people like my books, they have some idea of what the next one will be like.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

There is such a thing as literary fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.

The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life whichdoes not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.

Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

I think the danger with using the term 'trilogy' is that it sets up particular expectations in the reader's mind.

One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.

[French] authors are more afraid of offending delicacy and rules, than ambitious of sublimity.