Narrative Craft Quotes

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

Songwriting and screenwriting aren't that different to me.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

Good stories are constructed, not found.

I've always loved to write, and I wrote fiction all my life. That's what I thought I was going to do in my life - until I started writing songs.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

At the end of the day, the job is to tell the story that you promised to tell and do it in the most entertaining and perhaps surprising way you can think of.

Working with Robert, Robert [Elswit] is a storyteller. He's not a cinematographer, he's a storyteller. And to me, that's the graduation I hope to get to in my profession. That I'm not just an actor, I'm a storyteller. And I think that takes a long time in, when you have one job on a movie set. Makeup artists, actor, whatever. To graduate from just that to storyteller.

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

I continue to enjoy looking for stories, and trying to do the best job I can reporting and writing them.

I think part of being a good screenwriter is being as concise as possible.

I'm not an intellectual, I'm just a writer.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

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

In my own work, when I start off writing a scene, I don't know which physical details are going to turn out to be meaningful. But, inevitably, certain images will stand out - you start to decide which ones are important as you go.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you've done a story justice, you're in the wrong business.