Top 89 Quotes About Short Story Writing
#1. It's a distillation of all I know about writing: short-story writing, screenwriting, journalism - everything. There is no future in the novel, so far as I can see. I'm trying to show where writing is going to be. I may not get there, but I will point the way." In
Gerald Clarke
#2. I knew little about short story writing then so it was rough going, but I did find the experience very memorable.
Haruki Murakami
#3. I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.
Robert Sheckley
#4. Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
Lynn Abbey
#5. I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.
O. Henry
#6. There are a couple of utterly important rules to writing anything, whether it's a novel, a short story or a collection of poetry. And they're really the only rules.
1: Quit talking about it and start.
2: Focus and finish it.
Nicholas Trandahl
#7. Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
Gene Wolfe
#8. You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.
Larry Niven
#9. I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."
Ishmael Reed
#10. A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience ... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.
John L'Heureux
#11. Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#12. That night I sat up writing in my diary writing to Big Me: 'I hope you are alive ' I wrote. 'I hope that I don't die before you are able to read this.
Dan Chaon
#13. Writing the short story is essentially an act of grace. It's not a matter of will so much as trust. I try to let the story do some of the work for me. It knows what it wants to do, say, be. I try not to stand in its way.
Paulette Alden
#14. My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
Kate Atkinson
#15. It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.
Edna Ferber
#16. I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.
Sarah Hall
#17. The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.
V.S. Pritchett
#18. I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen.
Joe Meno
#19. The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one ...
Lawrence Block
#20. A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.
Isabel Allende
#21. A story is about a single moment in a character's life when a definitive choice is made, after which nothing is the same.
John L'Heureux
#22. For me, it's been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.
Cynthia Leitich Smith
#23. Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.
Amos Oz
#24. Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
Ray Bradbury
#25. For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.
Lynn Abbey
#26. If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls.
Susan Hill
#28. Sometimes ... it takes me an entire day to write a recipe, to communicate it correctly. It's really like writing a little short story.
Julia Child
#29. Although I'm very lazy when it comes to writing, I'm not that lazy when it comes to thinking. I like to develop the plan of a short story, then cut it as short as possible, try to evolve all the necessary details. I know far more about the characters than what actually comes out of the writing.
Jorge Luis Borges
#30. My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.
Raymond Carver
#31. I write movies, so - I look at boxing, and I commentated on it, as if I were telling you the story of a movie or a short story.
Ferdie Pacheco
#32. The hardest thing about writing a script is you finish it, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not like a novel or short story - a script is meant to be made into a movie.
Maggie Carey
#33. Writers need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down."
Mitchell Hurwitz
#34. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#35. When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
Ann Patchett
#36. There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.
Elizabeth McCracken
#37. I came up with a pen and tablet hoping to write an immortal short story, but I've been having a dreadful time with my heroine - I CAN'T make her behave as I want her to behave; so I've abandoned her for the moment, and am writing to you.
Jean Webster
#38. Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
V.S. Pritchett
#39. I'm actually writing a short story about a photographer who went completely insane trying to take a close up photo of the horizon.
Steven Wright
#40. Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.
Orson Scott Card
#41. A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
Edgar Allan Poe
#42. She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.
Anne Lamott
#43. While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights)
S.J. Rozan
#44. I write novellas, short books, whatever. I set out to write a good story not write a dictionary.
Jason E. Hodges
#45. I've been doing morning pages: the first thing I do when I wake up is sit down and write three pages of whatever comes into my head. The more I do them, the more creative I get and the smaller my problems seem. I can turn something that I hated a few days ago into a short story or a song.
T. Mills
#46. I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.
Gay Talese
#47. If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.
Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien
#48. I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.
Sherwood Anderson
#49. My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.
Roger Zelazny
#50. In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.
David Bergen
#51. I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
William Faulkner
#53. When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing-and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)
Daniel Quinn
#54. The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.
James Lasdun
#55. I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now ... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
George Saunders
#56. After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.
Vikram Seth
#57. I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
Stephen Graham Jones
#58. A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
Lorrie Moore
#59. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
Elizabeth McCracken
#61. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#62. To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.
Lorrie Moore
#63. For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.
Carol Bly
#64. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#65. When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.
Ann Leckie
#66. 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.
Dan Chaon
#67. For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
Eudora Welty
#68. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#70. I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.
John Sayles
#71. I feel with this film that as long as we tell Philomena's story and as long as we're true to her, which Jeff and Steve have already done by writing the story ... we must not sell her short;. She's a most remarkable woman and all my concern was that we must be absolutely true to her story.
Judi Dench
#72. I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.
Charles De Lint
#73. A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.
Gary Reilly
#74. I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.
Eric Brown
#75. I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
Eric Brown
#76. You can write anything you want to,
a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.
Brenda Ueland
#77. When you are falling short in vocabulary to explain the emotion in your story.Than you are writing the right story
Tushar Upreti
#78. [Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.
Sandra Cisneros
#79. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
[Letter to Harrison Blake; November 16, 1857]
Henry David Thoreau
#80. I remember selling my first short story and thinking, Oh my god, I sold something for fifty dollars! That gives me the authority to say I'm a writer and to actually write more things! It legitimized the activity.
Chuck Palahniuk
#81. When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.
Truman Capote
#82. You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.
Hilary Mantel
#83. You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.
Billy Bob Thornton
#84. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
Kevin Barry
#85. A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
David Sedaris
#86. Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
Dani Shapiro
#87. If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.
Edward Gorey
#88. For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H Gass
#89. I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
Bruce Coville
