Fiction Writing Process Quotes

#1. Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

Luke Taylor

#2. Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

Stephen King

#3. The author is impacted by a hidden insistence that takes the shape of different combinations each time a
different text is produced but the underlying problem remains the same for him.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya

#4. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story ... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

Stephen King

#5. Each time I discovered a potential link between one character's story and another's, several more connections would reveal themselves, like a beautiful, complex web spinning itself.

Richard Scarsbrook

#6. fiction writing can be a blast when you set aside debilitating notions of perfection and just dive headlong into the creative process.

Chris Baty

#7. By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Wallace Stegner

#8. The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.

Val Kovalin

#9. I have to say that writing about my writing process is more daunting than writing non-fiction.

Sefi Atta

#10. I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

John Fowles

#11. I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something ... or something.

Shannon Celebi

#12. I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.

Candace Bushnell

#13. My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.

Douglas Coupland

#14. Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

John Gardner

#15. I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.

Chigozie Obioma

#16. We're making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.

Clive Barker

#17. If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.

Saul David

#18. The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

Tom Robbins

#19. Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

Deborah Eisenberg

#20. It's neither and it's both. That's the perfect kind of art. Labels only detract from the artist's intention.

Ted Dekker

#21. People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

Michelle M. Pillow

#22. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.

Carla H. Krueger

#23. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]

Helen Dunmore

#24. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Flannery O'Connor

#25. And I've learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity.

Benjamin Kane Ethridge

#26. I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.
[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]

Cormac McCarthy

#27. Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.

Adam Langer

#28. Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Joan Didion

#29. A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

Wally Lamb

#30. Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

Octavia E. Butler

#31. A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?

Mary Papas

#32. I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

Catherine Lowell

#33. Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

Stephen King

#34. Writing is a psychological process. It is the process of taking what is in your mind and sharing it with others.

Gudjon Bergmann

#35. I've had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

Chila Woychik

#36. There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised nervous breakdown designed, with a bit of luck, to produce something worthwhile at the end.

David Hewson

#37. Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Tom Robbins