Top 100 Quotes About Writing A Story
#1. Ms. Scarlett always delivers hot, sexy alphas and this isn't any different. Holy smokes, is this ever HOT! Love her writing and the way she spins a story but adds the HOT factor. Her alphas are phenomenal! - JC
Scarlett Avery
#2. Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.
George Saunders
#3. Accept nothing. Challenge everything.
A.D. Posey
#4. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.
Samuel Colbran
#5. So if you are writing a story where love is the meaning, where love is the highest and best of all, where love is the point, then you have to allow each person a choice.
John Eldredge
#6. I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
Mark Twain
#7. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.
Anthony Trollope
#8. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#9. Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.
Bonnie Friedman
#10. Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
(advicetowriters)
George V. Higgins
#11. You will find the greatest happiness in letting yourself be.
A.D. Posey
#12. I love being able to create characters, give them problems, and make sure everything turns out right in the end. Writing gives me limitless opportunity to study the human condition, and a love story with a positive ending always lifts my spirits and warms my heart.
Jennie Adams
#13. Observing people. A spark of idea for a story sometimes comes from the simple act of observation.
Ika Natassa
#14. The challenge of the writer is to transform - artistically and imaginatively - a unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.
Hillel F. Damron
#15. I always plan the whole story in some detail, long before I start writing the actual thing. But even doing that, I find that there is plenty of room for spontaneity. Often the characters will lead the story off in a direction I hadn't originally intended!
Raymond Buckland
#16. Nothing good about this but it's title. A priggish little yarn. And Hidden Riches is not a story
it's a machine. It creaks. It never made me forget for one instant that it was a story. Hence it isn't a story.
L.M. Montgomery
#17. The story unfolded quickly as I typed, in a way I was becoming familiar with. There was something about putting the truth on paper, bringing facts into the light of day where everyone could look at them, that made my fingers move faster -- it was becoming one of my favorite sensations on earth.
Gwenda Bond
#18. I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.
Robin Hobb
#19. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.
Dana Brunetti
#20. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
Paul Auster
#21. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
#22. Don't look.
See.
Don't think.
Feel.
Don't hear.
Listen.
Pay attention
Miracles really do happen every day
A.D. Posey
#23. Energy will go into what you love, and what you love will grow. Go for a walk and watch it bloom.
A.D. Posey
#24. Headline writing is tough because often times you are given a predetermined number of spaces and words depending on the layout and the type of the story.
Jennifer Lee
#25. I haven't thought about writing so much as potentially producing and finding my own projects to get into production. I want to be able to buy the rights to a story that I have read or a book that I have read.
Mandy Moore
#26. If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#27. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
Salman Rushdie
#28. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.
Paul W. Feenstra
#29. It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.
Seeley James
#30. Now and again thousands of memories
converge, harmonize,
arrange themselves around a central idea
in a coherent form,
and I write a story.
Katherine Anne Porter
#31. Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.
Adam Ross
#32. Teens want to read something that isn't a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we're writing for our kids.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#33. I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.
Joss Whedon
#34. Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting.
Norman Lock
#35. You know, I've always wrote my best stuff when it takes me hardly any time at all. Actually I wrote ... this is actually a really funny story ... 'Ghost Of Vincent Price', I've been wanting to write a song about Vincent Price coz he's one of my favorite characters of all time.
Wednesday 13
#36. You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
Anne Enright
#37. I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.
Jean M. Auel
#38. The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.
Mary E. Pearson
#39. In my case, if I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know.
Haruki Murakami
#40. What draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.
Lisa Cron
#42. I like that it's challenging - that when I'm writing, I feel as if I'm pouring everything I have into the story until there's nothing left and I have to begin thinking about a new world and set of circumstances to research and explore.
Molly Antopol
#43. 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
#44. Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
Vijay Seshadri
#45. The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.
Nick Earls
#46. One of my book-reading friends used the term "our story unfolds" when describing a paper he was writing. He became somewhat less of a friend right at that moment.
Tommy Greenwald
#47. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.
Truman Capote
#48. Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story ... Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)
L.M. Montgomery
#49. Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#50. I'd love to take a stab at writing videogames. There are a lot of storytelling opportunities that really aren't being taken advantage of in that field. I'd like to experiment with telling a truly non-linear story.
Patrick Rothfuss
#51. You've gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you're studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.
Jennifer Echols
#52. 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
#53. 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.
#54. There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.
Julia Glass
#55. It's always more than just a story.
A.D. Posey
#56. We should all live as though someone is writing a book about us.
J.R. Rim
#57. I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.
David Byrne
#58. Budget grows out of the story. If you're writing a story with people caught in an elevator for most of the film, you're pretty sure it won't be a $200 million movie.
J. Michael Straczynski
#59. It's amazing what you can do when you get creative.
A.D. Posey
#60. Whenever I started writing music, it just naturally led itself there. As I started to tell my story, it's where my home was. It's just a very natural choice.
Jamie Lynn Spears
#61. I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer is to follow your initial [writing] plan too stringently. A story needs room to grow and evolve.
Patrick Rothfuss
#62. Your life should reflect your heart.
A.D. Posey
#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. Writing the opening lines of a story is a bit like starting to ski at the steepest part of a hill. You must have all your skills under control from the first instant.
Marion Dane Bauer
#65. I am a huge believer in revelations and fun twists.
Darynda Jones
#66. The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.
George Stephen
#67. All one needs to write a story is one feeling and four walls.
Doris Betts
#68. Love is the key to everything. Love your life.
A.D. Posey
#69. I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#70. I wrote this about you, about our love, our story. And I feel so damn lucky that others in this world, strangers in other parts, can steal a piece of what we have and feel so lucky too.
Crystal Woods
#71. Writing a novel mimics what we bring to our journey of life. God is the great editor who purges the faulty, the awkward, and all the bits that are just plain wrong, so the optimal story can finally emerge.
Denise M. Baran-Unland
#72. I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.
David Levithan
#73. Research is so vital to a great story. Know what you're writing about!
Beem Weeks
#74. We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#75. A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.
Bill Johnson
#76. To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.
Lorrie Moore
#77. I write for the kid in me ... Often when I'm working on a story, I'll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they've taken the story. It's as if they have a life all their own. What I do is create them and then let them go on to entertain me ...
Elvira Woodruff
#79. The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.
Maurice Blanchot
#80. Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it.
Sara Sheridan
#81. Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#82. I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
Julio Cortazar
#85. I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.
Iain Banks
#86. When we've decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.
Celine Kiernan
#87. Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both.
John Truby
#88. Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.
Patrick Ness
#89. Yes, it was scary, but every time I got a frisson of fear I tried to remember what Frank Quinn was always telling me. "Susan, believe in yourself. You are the person writing your story.
Susan Boyle
#90. When you were born, did your parents shove a book of world history in your face? No, absolutely not. They gave you what you could handle, and that's exactly how you need to treat the reader.
A.J. Flowers
#91. The more of those little light bulbs that can turn on the better. Eventually you'll have enough to light up a movie screen.
A.D. Posey
#92. The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting.
Stephen King
#94. Take a deep breath. Inhale peace. Exhale happiness.
A.D. Posey
#95. 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
#96. I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well.
Mark Millar
#97. A good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.
Roland Smith
#98. The song could start with a riff that I base the song around. Or a chord progression or a melody I have, I just write a story about it. Lyric-wise, it's cool to have someone else's input too.
Orianthi
#99. I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.
John D. MacDonald
#100. It was Rick's Rubin idea to have the 'Brooklyn' verse repeat. It already was a story, but having that made it a folk song. Instead of this rambling march of verses, Rick understands that music needs hooks. You need that repeated chorus, that everyone can sing along to.
Scott Avett
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