Fiction Writing Process Quotes

#1. We're making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves. #Quote by Clive Barker

#2. There's an analogy I came up with once for an interviewer who asked me how much of my material was autobiographical," Octavia says. "I said that the life experience of a fiction writer is like butter in cookie dough: it's a crucial part of flavor and texture - you certainly couldn't leave it out - but if you've done it right, it can't be discerned as a separate element. There shouldn't be a place that anyone can point to and say, There--she's talking about her miscarriage, or Look--he wrote that because his wife had an affair #Quote by Carolyn Parkhurst

#3. These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#4. I do have a little bit more confidence in - or at least familiarity with - my process. For example, when it feels like it's going badly or that I'm lost, I know I'll eventually find my way because I've been through it before. But writing itself is still hard. #Quote by Sara Zarr

#5. If we eliminate the word "writer", if we just go back to writing as an act of listening and naming what we hear, some of the rules dissappear. There is an organic shape, a form-coming-into-form that is inherent in the thing we are observing, listening to, and trying to put on the page. It has rules of its own that it will reveal to us if we listen with attention. Shape does not need to be imposed. Shape is a part of what we are listening to. When we just let ourselves write, we get it "right". #Quote by Julia Cameron

#6. I like to skip prewriting. I love just jumping into the actual writing process. Then I revise/edit and fix what I need to. Then the following steps; proofread and publish. Of course before you just go into writing, it would be a good idea to do some charts of each chapter ... what you would want each one to be about and have a character list with their personalities and how they will come into play in your book. I mean, you wouldn't just want to go all crazy and jot down all kinds of random stuff at once ... trust me, you'll go crazy. With writing, you take it as it comes, go with your own flow.-Nina Jean Slack #Quote by Nina Jean Slack

#7. Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper. #Quote by Annie Dillard

#8. Discipline, not the Muse, results in productivity. If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all. #Quote by Kenneth Atchity

#9. Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. #Quote by John Gardner

#10. You need to take some acting classes to learn to hide your huge crush on my husband better #Quote by Mary Papas

#11. Why is it important to look at fiction writing through the lens of emotional experience? Because that's the way readers read. They don't so much read as respond. They do not automatically adopt your outlook and outrage. They formulate their own. You are not the author of what readers feel, just the provocateur of those feelings. You may curate your characters' experiences and put them on display, but the exhibit's meaning is different in thousands of ways for thousands of different museum visitors, your readers. Not #Quote by Donald Maass

#12. Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived. Your job as a storyteller is not simply to entertain. Nor is it to be noticed for the way you turn a phrase. You have a very important job
one of the most important. Your job is to let people know that everyone shares their feelings
and that these feelings bind us. Your job is a healing art, and like all healers, you have a responsibility. Let people know they are not alone. You must make people understand that we are all the same. #Quote by Brian McDonald

#13. It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it. #Quote by Jon McGregor

#14. Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession #Quote by Alexandra Johnson

#15. Composing is a natural fit. As far as the creative process goes, I'd rather do this than anything else, by far. Something different happened to me when I started to write music to images. It was a feeling of excitement and connection and a sense of being in the right place that I never had before. #Quote by James Newton Howard

#16. A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. #Quote by Graham Greene

#17. I suppose I had some meaning when I wrote it; I believe I understood it then. #Quote by George Gordon Byron

#18. Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job. #Quote by Ngaio Marsh

#19. In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose. #Quote by Margaret Atwood

#20. There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting. #Quote by Jonathan Tropper

#21. When people say, 'you're so young to be a writer,' I always reply, 'I started young because I've got a lot to write. #Quote by Carla H. Krueger

#22. I had to really do some studying and examination of my own songwriting and I realized that, there's not a formula by any stretch of the imagination and aren't any rules, but there are principles. The first one is that art is a process, not a product. In fact, that holds true for damn near everything we do in life. The product is just something that happens. If you're faithful to the process, the product takes care of itself. #Quote by Andy Wilkinson

#23. I write first for myself as a therapeutic process, to get stuff out and to deal with it. #Quote by Lucinda Williams

#24. Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious thought, and the right to due process for composers, performers and retailers are imperiled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain. #Quote by Frank Zappa

#25. the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things. #Quote by Michael Chabon

#26. In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language. #Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

#27. Art is the overflow of emotion into action. #Quote by Brian Raif

#28. Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story. #Quote by Jeff VanderMeer

#29. Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing. #Quote by Roxane Gay

#30. Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.

But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonymity--confession without penance, truth without consequences--it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.

Those who leave such evidence can scarcely complain if strangers come along afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We're voyeurs, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we've found it? We're all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others.

But only locked. The rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire. #Quote by Margaret Atwood

#31. Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person's own precursors: it revises a person's conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the "now," and alters the course and outcome person's future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person's thoughts, debunk a person's delusion, and analyze a person's values. #Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

#32. I have been tossing around the idea of writing some non-fiction. Maybe a collection of short stories about my experience being a mom and how not to be perfect. #Quote by Melissa Peterman

#33. To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let 'em know you've written it! Then rinse and repeat. #Quote by Gerard De Marigny

#34. To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don't come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated. But it's not a question of the will, it is a mechanism I can set in motion or not, like scratching my nose or doing a backward roll. #Quote by Muriel Barbery

#35. As every writer knows ... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another ... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect. #Quote by John Gardner

#36. I've found that busting your ass on a daily basis to make your art good, clear, and meaningful creates the most luck. #Quote by Don Roff

#37. Sometimes when I prepare to write, I feel the same sensation wash over me as if my toes were curling over the brink of a high cliff, my gaze peering downward into a dark pond, and I anxiously wonder, will the water prove deep enough? Will my words be satisfactory? #Quote by Richelle E. Goodrich

#38. Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process - maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like 'Lights Please' happens like that. #Quote by J. Cole

#39. Making playlists can kill a whole afternoon for me. I like building very specific playlists for new writing projects. In a strange way, choosing certain songs is part of the process of plotting the book out. I pick songs that I think with resonate with characters, their personality quirks, relationship dynamics, action scenes, and so on. #Quote by Jonathan Maberry

#40. In ballet, any dancer who asks himself what step comes next must freeze. Any man who takes a sex manual to bed with him invites frigidity. Dancing, sex, writing a novel
all are a living process, quick thought, emotion making yet more quick thought, and so on, cycling round. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#41. We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green. #Quote by Geoff Dyer

#42. I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times. #Quote by Bill Styron

#43. I think writing in general can help us deal with anything we fear, anything which troubles us, anything that makes us angry or moves us. In fact, in most cases, writing has to engage with these feelings - the lack of engagement you find in parts of American writing is a form of imperialism turned inward. We don't see the poor, the abject, the destitute in fiction and literature nearly as much as we should. #Quote by John Freeman

#44. Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise
to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things
in order to make it come out right. #Quote by Kathleen Norris

#45. A piece of writing is only worth doing if you're a different person at the end of the process than you were at the beginning. #Quote by Brian Morton

#46. Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire. #Quote by Sara Sheridan

#47. I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books. #Quote by M.V. Carey

#48. For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. #Quote by Jamaica Kincaid

#49. The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow! #Quote by John Gaver