“I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it.” IfsFeelsWritingStoriesFictionLove StoryCraftsWriting Fiction Author:Joan Larkin
“[Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths.” ThinkingKnowsForgetFictionNovelEconomyPiecesPropertyBrilliantObservationCraftsNever ForgetCrucialForget ItIlluminating Author:Ali Smith
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.” RealSeemsTodayValuesLiteratureHouseCitiesFictionDisciplineFairsTraditionLonelyMilesCraftsFortyRoughSheepCandyPointlessSkullsCottonAthensMulesArcadiaQuillsCotton Candy Author:Alexander Theroux
“If you want to be a fiction writer, you need to start reading like a fiction writer. To do so, you need to learn about craft so that the next time you pick up a contemporary short story, you're reading it not as an abstraction floating in formaldehyde, existing simply for the theorist's dull scalpel to saw on, but as a concrete thing constructed out of words and shaped by syntax, brought to life by a writer who made several thousand choices, some large, some small, before letting that imperfect beauty, the story, walk on its own two feet.” IfsWantNeedsWritingMadeTwoStoriesChoicesReadingNextWalksFictionSawsFeetThousandPicksContemporaryCraftsDullShort StoryImperfectConcreteNext TimeFloatingAbstractionFiction WritersTheoristsSyntaxScalpels Author:John McNally
“Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.” ArtReasonFormWaterFictionIssuesStylePaintingElementsStrategyStructureMemoirCraftsNonfictionCompositionFormalPreciseCritiqueChronology Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.” IfsWritingI CanCan DoFictionCraftsI Have LearnedGreat WritersI Can Do It Author:Elliott Colla
“Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.” PeopleRealFictionInformationEmptyHistoricalCraftsHistorical FictionLacking Author:Hilary Mantel