“I think you will agree that I am alive in every part of this book; turn back twenty, thirty, one hundred pages - I am back there. That is why I hate the story; characters are not snakes that they must shed their skins on every page - there can only be one action: what a man is. When you have understood this, you will be through with novels.” ThinkingMenWritingBookCharacterStoriesActionHateTurnsNovelAlivePagesUnderstoodHundredSkinsI HateTwentiesAgreeThirtyShedSnakesI Am Alive Author:Kenneth Patchen
“Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.” NeedsFeelsMightFivePagesHundredTwentiesFiftyGet OverRewriting Author:Joan Didion
“About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched, and gazing down into the paper like a man soon to be converged upon. Goebel's testimony comes on like that: engrossing, fanatical, full of private grief, and yet, at the same time, charismatic, tender, and intrepid, aglow with more spirit than most Americans have the right to wield.” MenKindStoriesHandsSpiritReadingGriefPaperPagesTwentiesI RealizedTestimonyForeheadsFourteenLukeGazingCharismaticHand Holding Author:Blake Butler
“Michael Bohn provides a rare opportunity to experience the American sporting scene in the Roaring Twenties. A constant stream of legendary characters marches across these pages. You’ll meet them all: The Babe, The Four Horsemen, The Manassa Manassas Mauler, The Wheaton Iceman, Bill Tilden, Gertrude Ederle, and Grantland Rice, the sportswriter whose purple prose made them all come alive.” MadeCharacterOpportunityFourAliveScenePagesTwentiesBillsConstantStreamsProseMarchPurpleRiceBabeLegendaryRoaringHorsemenGertrudeFour HorsemenRare OpportunitiesRoaring Twenties Author:Peter Golenbock
“Twenty-two pages is not a lot of space. Believe me. Having written a bazillion comics, I still find myself more often than nine pages into a script and realizing to my horror that I'm only about a quarter of the way through the story I wanted to tell, and the next thing you know, I'm making fresh coffee and tearing up the floorboards to rewrite.” KnowsWayBelieveStillsTwoBookStoriesWantedNextRealizingSpaceWrittenHorrorPagesTwentiesScriptsCoffeeNineComicQuartersBelieve In MeComic BookTwenty Two Author:Mark Waid
“Stan Lee always wanted to do another syndicated strip while we were doing Spider-Man. I was working two jobs, and he wanted to make time to do another strip. He wanted to do a humor strip. I said, 'Stan, I barely make it through the week now. How the hell am I going to do another strip?' He said, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I always forget it takes you longer to do a page than it takes me to do twenty pages.'” MenSaidTwoBookWantedJobsForgetHellWeekPagesTwentiesSorryComicTake MeComic BookI'm SorrySpidersForget ItMaking TimeSpider ManTwo Jobs Author:John Romita, Sr.
“in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.” PeopleLittlesBookDifferentStoriesReadingChanceReaderLuckySixPagesOrdinaryLonelyMarkTwentiesAccomplishBoredDifferent PeoplesBook ReadingDifferent PlaceAlphabetOrdinary LifeReading Stories Author:Natalie Babbitt
“In this twenty-first century, there's no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and you'll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts.” NeedsWritingFirstsHumansMeanRealLanguageAnimalViewsCenturyEvolutionPagesTwentiesSpeciesInvisibleBeastImaginaryAccurateExtinctionWhat It Means To Be Human Author:John Felstiner
“There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.” NeedsLittlesTwoPagesTwenties Book:Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.” WritingWellsTwoPagesTwentiesSurprisingChaptersTwenty Two Author:John le Carre
“It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.” WritingFirstsMayNextFivePagesTwentiesScriptsHandleCrafts Author:Geoffrey S. Fletcher
“To a large extent: it's about economy of space. You have so little real estate when you're writing a half hour show. It's really twenty minutes. So you have to with a pilot introduce all your characters, set up the premise in a way that shows the potential for a series and make it funny and do it all in about thirty-five or forty pages. It's very hard.” WayWritingLittlesRealHardCharacterShowsHoursSpaceHalfEconomyFiveMinutesPagesTwentiesSeriesThirtyFortyPilotsIntroducingEstatesPremisesHalf Hours Author:Jonathan M. Goldstein
“Even when I'm just sitting at my desk, I have to get up every twenty minutes or so and walk around, walk around, walk around, and then I can go back to the page. I can't just sit there for hours at a time. Language comes out of the body as much as the mind.” MindI CanBodyLanguageHoursWalksMinutesPagesSittingTwentiesGet UpDesks Author:Paul Auster
“To be quite honest, along with thinking and such when it comes to writing, I'm not into words like "theory." I'm a PhD dropout. No matter how many twenty-five-page papers I wrote, I never felt like I was saying much. I didn't feel like the writer of the book, whose work I was analyzing, would have been impressed. It didn't matter how much time or effort I put in.” ThinkingFeelsWritingHas BeensBookMatterFeltEffortFiveHonestTheoryPaperPagesTwentiesImpressedPapersTwenty FiveAnalyzingPhdsDropouts Author:Mary J. Miller
“When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.” WritingTryingYearsLittlesStillsBookPlaySeemsNovelPoetCouplePagesHundredTwentiesSevenVery GoodDeterminedNineNovelistsFifteenNine YearsNineteenFunny Book Book:Conversations with Edward Albee Source: Conversations with Edward Albee
“Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.” NeedsWritingWellsMatterCharacterStoriesCoursesReadingTermRealizingMistakeFictionRocksPagesTwentiesFundamentalsVery GoodLovelyProseRejectsConcertsAbandonedHarmoniousGood StoryDepartureWorkshopsFiction WritingComplicationPicnicsRock Concerts Author:Monica Wood
“There have been times I thought that when I got a certain point in the story, a certain character was going to do a certain thing, only to get to that point and have the character make clear that he or she doesn't want to do that at all. That long phone conversation I thought the character was going to have? He hangs up the phone before the other person answers, and twenty pages of dialog I had half written in my head go out the window.” WantPersonsLongHas BeensCharacterStoriesCertainAnswersHalfClearWrittenConversationPagesWindowTwentiesPhonesHang Ups Author:Steve Erickson
“My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.” TryingStoriesPagesTwentiesLengthShort StoryBe YouStop TryingCarver Author:Zadie Smith