“I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.” StoriesSchoolLostHigh SchoolMovedSentencesLost Love Author:Tom Perrotta
“I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.” StoriesDecisionNovelConsciousSentencesDialogueRhythmLengthDozenAlways BelieveParagraphPlacementFlashback Author:Ron Rash
“Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.” WritingTryingStoriesSentencesStop Trying Author:James Patterson
“A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.” WayDoeStoriesJobsLiteratureSentencesManageTextureGood Story Author:Karen Thompson Walker
“Even one word, or certainly one sentence, should be able to describe the basic characteristic that the scene has, or the character has, or the story has. And then you begin to detail that one spine, and you have offshoots from that spine, and it becomes more and more complex, but all of it stems from that one-word, one-line theme, which can give the character, the scene, or the play its uniqueness.” GivingShouldPlayCharacterStoriesAbleLinesSceneComplexesDetailsSentencesCharacteristicsThemeUniquenessStemOne WordSpineOne LineOne Sentence Author:William Shatner
“Synonyms know each other like old colleagues, like a set of friends who've seen the world together. They swap stories, reminisce about their origins and forget that though they are similar, they are entirely different, and though they share a certain set of attributes, one can never be the other. Because a quiet night is not the same as a silent one, a firm man is not the same as a steady one, and a bright light is not the same as a brilliant one because the way they wedge themselves into a sentence changes everything.” KnowsMenWorldWayDifferentStoriesLightTogetherNightCertainForgetShareQuietSilentSentencesBrilliantFirmAttributesSteadyColleaguesWedgesSynonymReminiscingBright Lights Author:Tahereh Mafi
“I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragrapheach sentence, evenas I go along.” ThinkingNeedsWritingTryingLongI CanStoriesFeelingsHandsSeemsTurnsWishStuffPerfectPeriodsPaperSentencesFantasticEach DayNeuroticDaydreamingParagraph Author:William Styron
“Writing is a weird thing because we can read, we know how to write a sentence. It's not like a trumpet where you have to get some skill before you can even produce a sound. It's misleading because it's hard to make stories. It seems like it should be easy to do but it's not. The more you write, the better you're going to get. Write and write and write. Try not to be hard on yourself.” KnowsShouldWritingTryingHardStoriesSeemsEasySoundKnow HowProduceSkillsSentencesMisleadTrumpetsWeird Things Author:Gail Carson Levine
“Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.” NeedsWritingEndsWholeStoriesPiecesJourneyFrontsFiguresNotesBoxesSentencesWhole LifeLandscapePuzzlesSticky Author:Ashly Lorenzana
“The script of 'Shogun' was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn't take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story.” StoriesFrontsSceneScriptsSentencesRippleShoguns Author:John Rhys-Davies
“Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.” FirstsHumansPersonsI CanStoriesEyeMotherReadingVoiceLinesMy OwnSentencesInward Book:One Writer's Beginnings Source: One Writer's Beginnings
“Begin your story with a sentence that will immediately grab hold of your listener's ears like a surly nun in a Catholic school.” StoriesSchoolEarsCatholicSentencesStorytellingListenersNunCatholic SchoolSurly Author:Amy Sedaris