Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.
The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.
You know, I once read a short story about how much you could tell about people from their shoes. You could tell where they had been, what they did, whether they were real walkers.
In late 2001, I contributed a short story called 'Castaways' to an anthology called 'In Laymon's Terms,' which was a tribute to Richard Laymon, who had passed away earlier that year.
In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.
I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach.
At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'
Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.
I read James Joyce's short story 'The Dead,' and I love that movie for many reasons. It was the last film I made with my father, and it's emotional for me as well as a movie I'm proud of.
I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.
When I was a kid, the book that I liked the most was 'Aesop's Fables.' There was a version of it that my father read stories to us kids out of. I liked the idea of the short story format.
What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.
Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
A short story collection can be as exciting as a novel. It is a real complete experience, like when you listen to a real good recording, a Beatles record, and there are so many good songs.
I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.
I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.
Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story.
Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.
If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft.
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
It is very tough to make a short film. It's like writing a short story, which is tougher than writing a novel. You can't afford to faff around; you can't indulge. You have to get to the point.
I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.
I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books.
My first instinct was to cast as close to the short story as possible, but then I realized that I needed actors who could go for it and that they had to function well as a couple in a love story.
I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.
A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.
The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
I often say flippantly that the short story is... shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It's much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.
An editor named Kerrie Hughes wanted me to write a short story that brought my fire-spider Smudge from my goblin books into the present-day world. I came up with libriomancy as a way to make that happen.
I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
Maybe storytelling belongs in audio - a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.
In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.
I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel.
In all honesty, at that time, I never saw myself as an author... I was just a Mom in a state of panic, trying to enter a short story contest to win the prize money in order to keep the lights on in my home.
Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.
My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
When I was about 13 or 14, I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.
It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.
If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book.
So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content.
To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.
As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can't prove, which means you can't put them in the newspaper. But they're good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story.
I have always loved westerns... supernatural westerns in particular. One of my first professional short story sales was a horror/western story. It wasn't so great, though, so I'm glad the magazine folded before it saw print.
In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.
I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.