I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.
I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.
I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story.
One writes fables in periods of oppression.
Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
I think one of the reasons that I like fiction versus nonfiction is that I myself can kind of disappear from the story.
The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.
This is an IMAGINARY STORY...aren't they all?
STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached.
It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn't have an eventful childhood.
When I started to write realistic, real fiction, the voices that were the strongest for me - the characters that I heard, the people that I knew - were the ones from my childhood.
'Breaking Bad.' Because it's the best American narrative fiction of the last ten years.
I don't read fiction at all.
I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'
I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.
In general, fiction is divided into 'literary fiction' and 'commercial fiction.' Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn't stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed.
I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.
Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.
There are people who are bound journalistically to a code of ethics that means they can't quote something that isn't sourced, whereas what I do is entirely unsourced. I effectively fictionalise history and yet somehow aim at a greater truth.
Perhaps unscripted reality shows and written fiction have already blurred together into some new amalgamated mush, just as the line between commercials and programs has been trashed.
I categorically resist this idea that films are supposed to be autobiographical and the only stories you tell are about your own life.
I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.
A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
