What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.
Aristotle
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
Flannery O’Connor
The more successful you are in seducing your reader into the nature and world of this fiction, the more the reader is going to forget everything that’s in it. Structure has to work in pretty invisible ways.
Ian McEwan (Powells Interview January 2004)
No tool, in and of itself, has great importance. But placed in the proper hands it can create a masterpiece.
Joni Eareckson Tada
Perhaps all stories run into chaos. No matter how well constructed, how well organized, all stories end in chaos. In disaster.
Kristjana Gunnars
A word after a word after a word is power.
Margaret Atwood
Please start wherever you wish. Real life doesn’t have beginnings, middles and ends, not like stories in books.
Marina Warner
Still, I know nothing about the technical stuff of writing or where to put a comma. What I know about writing goes beyond where to put your commas. What I know about writing has to do with where you put your heart.
Nasdijj
Unfailingly find the fault line, the tiny place where meaning calls for some daring moves.
Nicole Brossard
Words in a sentence are a written gesture. And if the cadence is wrong – if the rhythm is wrong – if a single syllable is out of place – the sentence fails … the book fails. Why? Because you have failed to impel the reader forward with every gesture … right to the ‘fingertips’ – all the way from the solar plexus. That’s where books are written. That’s where readers read.
Timothy Findley