tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65339407007550831392023-07-17T21:59:53.565-07:00The Writing Life: Literary QuotationsGenre, craft, creativity, publishing, and the writing lifeJim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.comBlogger955125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-50488873052459176472020-11-19T03:00:00.000-08:002020-11-19T03:59:30.174-08:00What Is It Like To Be A Writer?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Asking what it's like to be a writer is a lot like asking what it's like to be a dentist or an attorney. The answer depends on where you live, what you write, how successful you are, how old you are, if you're married, and how you think of yourself as a writer. But there is one thing that most writers do say about the writing life: it's lonely and frustrating. Writers seem to feel misunderstood by people who don't write and under-appreciated or ignored by the reading public. Feeling isolated and forced to compete with other writers, many authors complain that their books are not adequately promoted by their publishers. Otherwise, they're a contented group of workers.<br /></div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-86527123315023925362020-10-06T02:00:00.000-07:002020-10-06T02:34:01.417-07:00John Cheever On Writing For Hollywood <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I went to Hollywood to make money. It's very simple. The people are friendly and the food is good, but I've never been happy there. Perhaps because I only went there to pick up a check.<br />
<br />
John Cheever</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-36938777292219895232020-10-06T01:00:00.001-07:002020-10-06T01:10:51.525-07:00Stephen King on Literary Agents<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need an agent until you're making enough money for someone to steal, and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.<br />
<br />
Stephen King</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-88252690822504232492020-10-06T01:00:00.000-07:002020-10-06T01:08:47.684-07:00Stephen King On The Craft Of Writing Fiction<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
All my life as a writer I have been committed to the idea that in fiction the story holds value over every other facet of the writer's craft; characterization, theme, mood, none of those things is anything if the story is dull. And if the story does hold you, all else can be forgiven....<br />
<br />
I'm not any big-deal fancy writer. If I have any virtue it's that I know that. I don't have the ability to write the dazzling prose line. All I can do is entertain people. I think of myself as an American writer....<br />
<br />
My greatest virtue is that I know better than to evade my responsibilities by the useless exercise of trying to write fancy prose. I entertain people by giving them good stories dealing with the content of ordinary American ives, which is the best, truest tradition of American fiction.<br />
<br />
Stephen King<br />
<br />
</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-28468120655183171422020-08-18T11:50:00.000-07:002020-08-18T08:54:35.091-07:00The Benefits Of Writing Nonfiction Over Fiction<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I find the possibility of life as a fiction writer horribly depressing. Nonfiction, meaning journalism, essays, scholarly work, etc. is far more important to me because I am attempting to have an actual impact on the culture, on politics, and on ideas in people's heads. Nonfiction provides a more direct line to all of those things than fiction, which is too often used as an escape or to console people about their lives. Oh, and nonfiction pays much better.<br />
<br />
Nick Mamatas</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-8302717369644827582020-08-18T07:00:00.002-07:002020-08-18T04:12:01.606-07:00The Effect of Literary Prizes on Writers' Egos <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Any author who gets a swelled head because he has been given a prize or a plaque is a foolish man.<br />
<br />
John O'Hara </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-75967759904696643552020-08-18T07:00:00.001-07:002020-08-18T04:09:22.204-07:00The Allure Of The Evil Character <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's a daring thing [for a "literary" novelist] to write about an evil person, especially in this day of autobiographical fiction, when readers assume most characters are thinly veiled self-portraits. And yet evil characters are usually dynamic and fascinating, upstaging all the goodie-goodies. [Crime novels are popular because the good guy is after the bad guy. Moreover, the evil character is one of the reasons behind the popularity of the true crime genre. For me, real villains are even more fascinating than fictitious ones.]<br />
<br />
Despite the allure of such characters, writers today usually avoid them, maybe because the whole category of Evil seems too theological or because modern psychology assumes that every bad act can be traced to childhood neglect or abuse and thus be explained away. [Novelists should familiarize themselves with the concept of sociopathy. Besides, who cares if a serial killer had a bad childhood?]<br />
<br />
Edmund White<br />
<br />
</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-64206865473054316782020-08-18T07:00:00.000-07:002020-08-18T04:08:26.549-07:00Sylvia Plath On Not Writing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I was getting worried about becoming too happily stodgily practical: instead of studying [John] Locke, for instance, or writing--I go make an apple pie, or study <i>The Joy of Cooking</i>, reading it like a rare novel. Whoa, I said to myself. You will escape into domesticity and stifle yourself by falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter. And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf...and she works off her depression over rejections from <i>Harper's </i>(no less!--and I can hardly believe that the Big Ones got rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen.<br />
<br />
Sylvia Plath </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-1018092428020522532018-12-22T05:30:00.000-08:002018-12-22T02:31:21.731-08:00Even Famous Novelists Are Kind Of Anonymous <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Whatever fame a novelist may attain, it's always kind of an anonymous one. I can go anywhere, and no one knows who I am.<br />
<br />
Jonathan Kellerman </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-64216203316134161682018-12-22T05:25:00.000-08:002018-12-22T02:30:30.304-08:00How "Catch-22" Was Written<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I spent two or three hours a night on it for eight years. I gave up once and started watching television with my wife. Television drove me back to <i>Catch-22</i>. I couldn't imagine what Americans did at night when they weren't writing novels.<br />
<br />
Joseph Heller </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-7803376767464034662018-12-22T05:20:00.000-08:002018-12-22T02:29:40.958-08:00Flaubert's Self Loathing: Get a Grip <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don't come, when I find I haven't written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie their dazed, bogged down in a swamp of despair, hating myself. </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-36457516473892769102018-12-21T05:34:00.000-08:002018-12-21T02:35:46.452-08:00The Comic Novel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Comic novels often offend as many people as they please because each reader's capacity for tolerating irreverence is different; what seems tame to one reader seems right to another, what seems corrosive to one reader seems hilarious to another.<br />
<br />
Jane Smiley</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-20608483343460306782018-12-21T05:31:00.000-08:002018-12-21T02:34:35.459-08:00Writer Ben Hecht On Hollywood<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I knew her name--Madam Hollywood. I rose and said good-by to this strumpet in her bespangled red gown; good-by to her lavender-painted cheeks, her coarsened laugh, her straw-dyed hair, her wrinkled fingers bulging with gems. A wench with flaccid tits and sandpaper skin under her silks, shined up and whistling like a whore in a park; covered with stink like a railroad station pissery and swinging a dead ass in the moonlight.<br />
<br />
Ben Hecht</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-5507464862508653112018-12-21T05:30:00.000-08:002018-12-21T02:33:44.534-08:00The Effect Of Fame On Friendship <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Most people who become suddenly famous overnight will find that they lose practically eighty percent of their friends. Your old friends just can't stand it for some reason.<br />
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Truman Capote</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-12447653690015382502018-12-20T05:16:00.000-08:002018-12-20T02:17:13.211-08:00What Is Narrative?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Narrative is <i>the representation of an event or series of events. </i>"Event" is the key word here, though some people prefer the word "action." Without an event or an action you may have a "description," an "exposition," an "argument," a "lyric," some combination of these or something else altogether, but you won't have a narrative. "My dog has fleas" is a description of my dog, but it is not a narrative because nothing happens. "My dog was bitten by a flea" is a narrative. It tells of an event. The event is very small one--the bite of a flea--but that is enough to make it a narrative.<br />
<br />
H. Porter Abbott</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-9534787804221223782018-12-20T05:11:00.000-08:002018-12-20T02:16:07.634-08:00The Use Of Exclamation Points In Dialogue<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Exclamation points in dialogue tend to make statements sound lovesick teenage email. Try at all costs to avoid using them!<br />
<br />
Allison Amend </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-74291754007841624102018-12-20T05:10:00.000-08:002018-12-20T02:15:12.236-08:00The "Cozy" Mystery Novel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A "cozy" is a mystery novel with a light tone and an element of fun; the setting is usually a small community and the protagonist is an amateur sleuth who's a member of the community. Sex and violence occur, for the most part, offstage. Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple remains the quintessential cozy protagonist.<br />
<br />
Hallie Ephron</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-85369507779977116092018-12-19T06:02:00.000-08:002018-12-19T03:09:27.998-08:00The Author As Celebrity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I remember when looks started to matter in publishing. I began writing in the late 1960s--just as publishing was turning into an industry. The cult of personality had arrived, and writers could no longer be private people as my grandfather, my mother and my uncle, all professional novelists, had been. The notion of having author photographs on book jackets appalled them: They believed they could write freely only if they felt anonymous.<br />
<br />
My generation had no such qualms. We poured out our indignations, our quirky personalities, made ourselves vulnerable. I was young when my first book was published and had quick success; I roared round the world on the Concorde, from one international convention to the next. I like to think it was because I wrote good novels, not because I fluttered my eyelashes, but really, who can say? With age things calm down. Publicity photographs give up trying to make you look sexy and try to make you look intelligent.<br />
<br />
Fay Weldon</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-68087620242986434482018-12-19T06:01:00.000-08:002018-12-19T03:08:45.667-08:00Setting Up The Novel's Big Scene<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I can always tell when a writer has rushed through a scene or written around it in order to get to the good stuff. The dialogue is hurried, like the wedding vows in a tired old comedy where the bride's in labor. Descriptions are sketchy or nonexistent. Too often, the scene isn't even there; the novelist has lifted it out and thrown it away, or not written it at all. At best, this leaves an annoying gap. At worst, the "good" scene has not been set up and so it falls in like a cake because someone skimped on the eggs. In between is a lost opportunity, because sometimes the scene you dreaded most turns out to be the best in the book.<br />
<br />
Loren D. Estleman</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-72723435465387140712018-12-19T06:00:00.000-08:002018-12-19T03:07:55.449-08:00Isaac Asimov's Relationship to The Characters in His Novels <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My stories write themselves, and the characters do and say whatever they please without reference to me at all. I am not responsible for them, and their views are not necessarily mine.<br />
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Isaac Asimov </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-17269320563496311182018-12-18T05:51:00.000-08:002018-12-18T02:54:01.681-08:00The Happy Novelist<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It may be that writers are actually happier living in their books than they are in the real world. There is evidence of this in the way writers immerse themselves in their fiction. How many times have you heard it said about someone that they are happiest at their work? Writers are like that, whether they admit it or not. But while most jobs fall into the nine-to-five category, fiction writing is a twenty-four-hours-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don't take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.<br />
<br />
Terry Brooks</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-60493828823748535932018-12-18T05:50:00.000-08:002018-12-18T02:53:11.771-08:00Don't Rush Your Novel's Ending <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
One of the main pitfalls to avoid when writing your novel's ending is what I call The Horse Nearing the Barn Syndrome. Writing fiction is satisfying but hard work, and the tendency is to hurry things along when you know you're approaching the end. You want that feeling of accomplishment, and the sooner you type "The End" the sooner you will experience it. But you haven't done your job if the reader senses this impatience in the work. The story's pacing should remain firmly under your control, so that the ending seems a natural outcome of what went before. No inconsistency should jar the reader from your fictional world, or put him or her outside the story looking in, rather than experiencing on a vicarious level what your characters are experiencing. It's comforting to know the reader's cooperating with you in achieving this mesmerizing effect. Even rooting for you. Nobody begins reading a novel wanting to be disappointed.<br />
<br />
John Lutz in <i>Writing Mysteries, </i>Sue Grafton, editor, 2001 </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-26821810146197663462018-12-18T05:45:00.000-08:002018-12-18T02:52:06.861-08:00Who Or Whom?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When do you use <i>who</i> and when do you use <i>whom</i>? The answer is, "Who cares?" Or, if you prefer, "Whom cares?"<br />
<br />
Joel Saltzman</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-29479276363114422312018-12-17T05:50:00.000-08:002018-12-17T02:51:56.778-08:00The Novelist And Higher Education <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It is true that some writers have kept themselves more or less innocent of education, that some, like Jack London, were more or less self-made men; that is, people who scratched out an education by reading books between work-shifts on boats, in logging camps or gold camps, on farms or in factories. It is true that university education is in many ways inimical to the work of the artist: Rarely do painters have much good to say of aetheticians or history-of-art professors, and it's equally uncommon for even the most serious, "academic" writers to look with fond admiration at "the profession of English." And it's true, moreover, that life in the university has almost never produced subject matter for really good fiction. The life has too much trivia, too much mediocrity, too much soap opera, but consider:<br />
<br />
No ignoramus--no writer who has kept himself innocent of education--has ever produced great art.<br />
<br />
John Gardner</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6533940700755083139.post-30209432077649592132018-12-17T05:44:00.000-08:002018-12-17T02:50:55.274-08:00Writing The Whodunnit Crime Novel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Most of my fiction writing has been in the murder mystery novel genre, specifically whodunits, in which there usually are four to six suspects. One of the most difficult aspects of writing whodunits is to give all of these suspects roughly equal motives for having committed the murder. The idea is to keep the reader guessing as long as possible.<br />
<br />
I try to adhere to the doctrine of fair play in the plot. That is, I put in clues so that the reader could conceivably identify the murderer. Having said that, I bury the clues by making them hard to spot. Many of these clues are embedded in seemingly innocuous details. [In real life, people often commit murder with virtually no motive that makes any sense. Moreover, people with the most obvious motives often turn out to be innocent. In the murder mystery genre the plots have to make sense. In true crime they just have to be true.]<br />
<br />
Robert Goldsborough</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0