“A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation.” PeopleIfsThinkingWayWantWellsKindSometimesStoriesReadingBitsFictionBrokenShort StoryRenaissanceBroken UpReadershipFragmentation Author:Lorin Stein
“I'm more thrilled by the short fiction than I expected to be. I've found more pleasure in reading short fiction than I used to. By seeing what kinds of thinking are going on in short fiction. I was also surprised by the panic I've felt, especially at first, when we'd put an issue to bed and then realized we had to put another one together.” ThinkingFirstsKindTogetherUsedReadingFoundFeltPleasureFictionIssuesSeeingBedExpectedPanic Author:Lorin Stein
“I am always interested in characters who are in these kinds of transitional moments in their lives, when it's not clear where they're going to end up. It's interesting territory for fiction.” KindEndsMomentsCharacterInterestingFictionClearTerritory Author:K. M. Soehnlein
“It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.” PeopleThinkingWritingKindSpiritualFictionCareersSeriousCriticsTreatedMediumsFraudAcademiaFiction WritingWriting FictionEssayists Author:Alexander Chee
“I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.” WritingKindFictionCareersStudyGrewNormalGrew UpLettersDevotedEssaysFiction Writing Author:Alexander Chee
“The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.” FeelsKindIdeasStoriesNaturalFictionSituationEncountersProseLengthShort Story Author:Nicholas Royle
“While the film [Hide and seek] is a work of fiction, I know many people, not just women, who have felt the way my character feels in the film, a certain kind of invisibility. I am grateful that my parents, Bev Umehara and Russell Chang, instilled a healthy sense of self-esteem in me from an early age.” PeopleKnowsWayFeelsKindSelfCharacterAgeFilmCertainFeltParentFictionSelf EsteemHealthyGratefulEsteemSense Of SelfInvisibilityI Am GratefulHide And Seek Author:Garth Kravits
“I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.” KindDifferentFictionPoetCommentFiction Writers Author:Sandra Cisneros
“I think that is one of the things that is beautiful about fiction and that you can do through drama. If I was a detective, I could make a certain version of everything we know to be exactly true. And that would have a certain kind of truth value. And there are certain other things that we know that are emotionally true.” IfsThinkingKnowsKindBeautifulCertainValuesCan DoFictionDramaVersionsDetectives Author:Liza Johnson
“These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not.” KindFictionNovelSpecialDarePursueSignificanceMy SisterZombieSpecial To Me Author:Joyce Carol Oates
“[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon.” WorldWayWritingYearsKindPersonsIdeasStoriesLastsGuyWhiteFictionCrazyMiddleEnlightenmentThirdsAll KindsGenreBelongingSixtySeventiesMiddle AgedCanonCrazy ThingsEpitomeWhite GuysThird PersonBrash Author:Emily Barton
“To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters.” IfsKindPlayCharacterStoriesSeemsBitsFictionClearCreatingSakeExperimentsNot InterestedCreating Characters Author:Steve Erickson
“What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you're doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, "Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!" And that's how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.” IfsWorldKindDifferentEndsStoriesUniverseGamesNamesWaitingFictionFantasyMinutesParticularReaderCreatingScience FictionHistoricalHeyHistorical FictionFandomsFictional Worlds Author:Neal Stephenson
“Most people have made this mistake of thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of earth or is another planet of the science fiction sort but it's just an old fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the Ocean.” PeopleThinkingWorldKindMadeEarthMistakeFictionMiddleThis WorldParticularPlanetsOceanScience FictionOld FashionedMiddle Earth Author:J. R. R. Tolkien
“The condition of visibility as it relates to black people was crucial. Connected to that, I've always been interested in science fiction and horror films and was acutely aware of the political and social implications of Ralph Ellison's description of invisibility as it relates to black people, as opposed to the kind of retinal invisibility that H.G. Wells described in his novel Invisible Man.” PeopleMenWellsKindFilmPoliticalSocialBlackFictionNovelConditionsHorrorScience FictionConnectedInvisibleRelateDescriptionCrucialBlack PeopleImplicationsHorror FilmInvisibilityVisibility Author:Kerry James Marshall
“Those are the movies that we [with Evan Goldberg] always wanted to make. Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, the kind of movies where violence and comedy and characters kind of work together really well.” WellsKindCharacterWantedTogetherFictionComedyViolenceDogWorking TogetherReservoirsPulpReservoir Dogs Author:Seth Rogen
“In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.” LooksKindMadeMemoriesFictionChildhoodEffectsGrewElementsGrew UpScience FictionTime Travel1960sFiction Writers Author:William Gibson
“There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.” KindCharacterFactsVoiceImaginationCommonFictionTalkingGreaterPerceptionClaimsDistanceNarrativeDistributionNon Fiction Author:E. L. Doctorow
“My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it's like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.” IfsThinkingKnowsShouldWritingTryingKindPersonsStoriesBigsMightMotherAsksEnergyFictionPlansDangerApproachJokesNotionCardsBoresInsultingWriting Fiction Author:George Saunders
“That's one of the reasons I take a lot of consolation in fiction. You have years to work on it. I think that allows you to reach for the best part of your reader instead of a lot of the internet stuff, in which you're kind of reaching for the worst or the most shallow part of your reader.” ThinkingYearsKindReasonStuffFictionWorstReaderInternetReachingShallowConsolation Author:George Saunders
“I really need to know where I'm going with fiction to write it in a way that at least I'm happy with. And I really think that a lot of fiction books end badly because terrific writers said, "I'll just figure it out" and plunge in, but have created so many problems that they are kind of impossible to solve. I mean, I'm talking really good writers do this and you can tell when they got to the end they either had to do something preposterous or they just don't really resolve things. So for fiction I spend a lot more time outlining and for humor I really don't do much of it.” ThinkingKnowsWayNeedsWritingKindMeanSaidBookEndsProblemFictionTalkingImpossibleFiguresSolveResolveMore TimeTerrificPlungeGood WritersOutlining Author:Dave Barry
“When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.” PeopleWritingKindDifferentFictionWorryFieldsPoetCrossesPerformancesGenreFilmmakerOccupationCommentMixingWorkshopsFiction WritersAnthropologistsWriting WorkshopMixing It Up Author:Sandra Cisneros
“The religious paradigm and the science fiction paradigm are different. Apologies to science fiction fans, but the paradigm there is to create a new world and describe it with a kind of specificity that we describe the world we inhabit. Religiosity, on the other hand, does none of that.” WorldKindDoeDifferentHandsReligiousFictionFansScience FictionNew WorldApologyParadigmSpecificity Author:Malcolm Gladwell
“I think I've actually benefited from Australia being a kind of combination of both British and American culture. We kind of got the best of both British and American television and books, science fiction and fantasy, and so on. So I'm familiar with a lot of, for example, American books and television that a British author of my generation might not be.” ThinkingKindBookMightCultureFictionFantasyGenerationsExampleTelevisionScience FictionBritishFamiliarCombinationAustraliaAmerican CultureMy GenerationAmerican TelevisionScience Fiction And Fantasy Author:Garth Nix
“It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.” WritingKindStoriesRememberRealizingFictionHistoricalHistorical FictionWriting Stories Author:Wendell Berry
“Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.” KindCareFictionDangerPoetBecomingFiction Writers Author:John Updike