The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
– Cynthia Ozick
Tag: fiction
Quotable 436
Good fiction often takes the banal around us and defamiliarizes it.
– Edmund White
Quotable 429
The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what its about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising … and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.
– Neil Gaiman
Quotable 424
First-rate fiction lays hands on the reader, to heal him or rough him up or, ideally, to do both.
– Ellen Currie
Quotable 411
I think of fiction as a kind of inquiry into what it is to be a human and what it is to be a human now.
– Deborah Eisenberg
Quotable 395
The purpose of fiction is to affect rather than to convince the reader. Its object is to reach him through his senses rather than through his mind. The purpose of argumentation is to convince; the purpose of description is to present a picture; the purpose of exposition is to impart knowledge, ideas, facts: but the characteristic purpose of narrative in the fictional sense in which we are taking it here is to make the reader feel.
– Thomas H. Uzzell
Quotable 389
Fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer’s courage.
– Dorothy Allison
Quotable 339
Honestly, everything I’ve learned about fiction, I’ve learned from writing it and reading it.
– Peter Tzinski
Quotable 278
The real key to pacing in fiction isn’t to make events happen faster, it’s to give them more meaning so that we care.
– C. C. Finlay
Precarious Balance
He sat upon his horse in a little clearing, alone, as he said he would be. He was waiting for me to come, also alone, as I had promised.
I was hiding in the thick greenery of the forest. I had an arrow aside my ear, drawn tautly in my bow. It would be so easy. A loosening of my fingers and my arrow would speed straight for his heart and that problem would be at an end.
But he just waited patiently, surely knowing I was there.
And he had something draped over his horse, behind him. I greatly feared I knew what he had. I would need him alive for answers, and there would be plenty of time to kill him later.
I moved gently and slackened my bow; the arrow went back into the quiver and I slung the bow over my shoulder as I stepped out into the open to speak with the sheriff of Nottingham.
“Foxwell,” I greeted him.
“Locksley.” Perhaps he was just being polite, but he knew I no longer use that name. Now, I answer to what the peasants of Nottinghamshire call me: Robin Hood.