Top 82 Writing Details Quotes
#1. When I began my career as a writer I thought it would be fun to put my imagination to the page. Now I am finding out that my imagination is able to fill in those pesky holes called details all on its own, and then neglecting to tell me how it did it.
Jonathan Bender
#2. There's an expression, "God is in the details," and it applies to nothing more than it does to the writing of fiction. To that and to the art of telling good lies. And what is fiction but the telling of lies?
Donna Levin
#3. My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.
Paul Auster
#4. What's invaluable about actually going to the places you want to write about are the random accidental things that happen. Random, accidental detail is the best way to make a setting convincing. You can of course invent your own random details, and sometimes I will also mash up real incidents.
Zachary Lazar
#5. 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
#6. It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?
Arthur Conan Doyle
#7. When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.
Paul Auster
#8. Details are where a theory can be held together or fall apart. The same is true about a plot.
Sarah Richards
#9. I always work from an outline, so I know all the of the broad events and some of the finer details before I begin writing the book.
Mercedes Lackey
#10. The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.
Gerald Murnane
#11. I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing 'Cum Laude.' So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby ... but the students and cast of characters are fictional.
Cecily Von Ziegesar
#12. Keep things informal. Talking is the natural way to do business. Writing is great for keeping records and putting down details, but talk generates ideas. Great things come from out luncheon meetings which consist of a sandwich, a cup of soup, and a good idea or two. No martinis.
T. Boone Pickens
#13. Mike Ruby, a writer in the magazine's Business section, used to call Newsweek writing f - k-style journalism: Flash (the lead), Understanding (the billboard - why is this story important), Clarification (tell the details of the story), and Kicker (bringing it all together with a clever ending).
Lynn Povich
#14. When it comes to creating compelling fiction, the devil may be in the details, but it is your imagination that ultimately allows your work to spread its wings and take flight. And fly it must. Only by soaring above the clouds of doubt can one truly achieve a suspension of disbelief
Max Hawthorne
#15. While I am writing about the details of my own intimate encounters and journeys in America and the Far East.
Frederick Lenz
#16. I never sit and fill a journal with lyrics. Most of the time I'm trying to write a feeling, not a story. I'm not necessarily trying to describe the details of a place or event so much as the feeling of the thing. It is a kind of weird alchemy that is elusive until it feels right.
Matt Berninger
#17. So much of a novelist's writing ... takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.
Graham Greene
#18. Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience ... many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.
Robert Adams
#19. I paint as the mood takes me- it is an emotional release. But in this society moods and images can incriminate you. Writing is much safer for me. I can hide myself behind a maze of words and the details of people's lives.
Ma Jian
#20. 'Dreamsongs' allows me to show the scope of my writing - with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing.
George R R Martin
#21. There are no "great" subjects for the creative writer; there are only the singular details of a single human life.
Richard Selzer
#22. For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.
Taylor Swift
#23. So you're stuck. Every time your madman starts to write, your judge pounces on him ... So start by promising your judge that you'll get around to asking his opinion, but not now. And then let the madman energy flow ... Save details for the judge.
Betty Sue Flowers
#24. 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
#25. Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.
Kevin Henkes
#26. Despite my affection for subtext and plot and prose at its best... life, it turns out, is nothing more than the finer details.
Bailey Vincent
#27. If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.
Ruth Rendell
#29. Writing in a nuanced way, getting at all the details in a way that remains interesting for the reader, is very difficult.
Carl Hart
#30. Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.
Sara Sheridan
#31. The difference between you and I Dre is that i can take a bad experience and make money off it, You just have to live with yours until time blurs your memory of the details.
Most writers i know aren't beautiful by society's standard. Writing is not modelling but Writer's do have beautiful souls.
Crystal Evans
#32. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.
Chuck Palahniuk
#33. I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.
Jonathan Lethem
#34. I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.
Mark Billingham
#35. Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.
Frank McCourt
#36. When it comes to details, more is not necessarily better.
Donna Levin
#37. I never wrote anything down. I never kept a diary, never kept a journal. I did write one letter home about touring with the Doors that I used as a reference for the book for some details there, and then I was glad I had that, but that was it.
Linda Ronstadt
#39. As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
Aristotle.
#40. I never thought I was capable of writing a whole book until Ursula K. Le Guin, with whom I worked briefly in publishing, said, 'you already wrote one (referencing a screenplay), you just need to add the details.
E.L. Sayers
#41. When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.
Tea Obreht
#42. Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that there's a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life.
Suzanne Vega
#43. Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.
Sara Sheridan
#44. You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.
Sara Sheridan
#45. Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.
Piers Anthony
#46. A lot of the people I was writing with think a lot more about lyrics and a lot more about the details from the beginning. That kind of thinking made me a little self-conscious because I was suddenly having to judge what I was doing early on in the process.
St. Lucia
#47. I feel like having details from their day and having a plot and action and things to do is much more revealing than having a character sitting and thinking to themselves. When I'm writing, I want people to actually have a goal, something that's dragging them forward.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#48. If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.
John Irving
#49. My writing is an answer to the partisans of the many and it returns their attack with interest, with a view to showing that the hypothesis of the many, if examined sufficiently in detail, leads to even more ridiculous results than the hypothesis of the One
Zeno Of Elea
#50. I like writing about places, about people and environments. When I create a world, it lets me go in and define the details of that world.
Halsey
#51. Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.
Kenneth Koch
#52. Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use.
Samuel Johnson
#53. If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details ... real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.
Anna Quindlen
#54. I don't have much of an imagination, but I have a mind bank of details, which I play with. It's how I daydream, so writing like that is natural for me.
Sefi Atta
#56. Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom's Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.
Anna Garlin Spencer
#57. For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
Stephen King
#58. When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
Charles Baxter
#59. There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.
Felix J. Palma
#60. Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.
Rose Tremain
#61. Never ask about the details of someone's personal life, only the quality. Because if they want you to know, they'll let you know. If they don't want you to know, there is no need to know.
S.A. Tawks
#62. Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.
Natalie Goldberg
#63. I so admire great writing done quickly, with great detail.
Peter King
#64. If I'm writing about a modern-day suburb, there's going to be details of the home and furniture, and if I'm writing about a historical period, those details, those pieces of the world are going to be there as well, but they'll be simplified, because I'm cartooning it.
Gene Luen Yang
#65. You want to anchor the scene with physical details, but by and large it's better to use sensual details rather than overtly sexual ones.
Diana Gabaldon
#66. I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.
John Darnielle
#67. The advantage of writing from experience is that it often provides you with details that you would never think of yourself, no matter how rich your imagination. And specificity in description is something every writer should strive for.
Christopher Paolini
#68. Details are extremely important. A story without details is like an action movie without special effects.
Mark A. Roeder
#69. All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
V.S. Naipaul
#70. Writing a novel is a lot like directing a movie because you are creating a world and a tone, you are creating a large canvas and all the details.
Stephen Chbosky
#71. You don't go to other books and take little pieces because although say a romantic scene may have been many times before all the details of who it is, where it is, are so intertwined in that text that it's easier to write it from scratch.
Bill Gates
#72. Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.
Anne Tyler
#73. The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic ... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.
Chuck Palahniuk
#74. I realized going back and writing and explaining in details the difficulties I had lived actually became emotional again. It's like therapy but sometimes therapy can be painful. But it's part of life and part of the autobiography so I'll have to finish it sooner or later.
Jenni Rivera
#75. remember, just because you're writing fiction doesn't mean that you can ignore facts. It is those details that make fiction compelling and, in many cases, very real for the reader.
Roy A. Teel Jr.
#76. If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
Caroline B. Cooney
#77. Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned,-the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.
Lord Acton
#78. The personal screenplay- where you dive into the terrifying depths of your soul, unearth the most intimate details about yourself, and put it on paper for the world to see. Proceed with caution, for madness lies ahead.
A.D. Posey
#79. Small details are a vital part of allowing a reader to make an imaginative connection with long dead historical figures.
Sara Sheridan
#80. Each sentence should have proper meaning, details should not be needlessly repeated, and every sentence should add to the entertainment value in one way or another.
A.J. Flowers
#81. My style of lyric-writing is very specific and has a lot of details, and I think people react most to that.
Craig Finn
#82. Really good writing, from my perspective, runs a lot like a visual on the screen. You need to create that kind of detail and have credibility with the reader, so the reader knows that you were really there, that you really experienced it, that you know the details. That comes out of seeing.
Ann Voskamp
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