"Don't put anything into a story that does not reveal character or advance the action."
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Stories quotes
Stories
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Stories quotes (page 69 of 332)
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"I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is 'Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce."
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"All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again."
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"In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine."
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"I've never looked at my career in terms of, What haven't I done that I want to do? I just generally find a story that I think is a good one and go to work"
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"I used my daughter's crayons for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle."
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"A story has to be a good date, because the reader can stop at any time. Remember, readers are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything."
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"The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty."
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"I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work."
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"Somethings get easier. You get more confident in your abilities and you learn what kind of stories sell and what don't. But your standards kept going up with your skills, the business aspect of writing grows more complicated, and it becomes really hard to maintain any semblance of a balanced life the longer you're at this. No matter what level you're at, writing is always difficult."
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"Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy."
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"For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel."
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"The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all."
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"I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it."
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