Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.
disclaimer:This is a work of nonfiction, but it is also full of dreams, speculations, and shadows. Many names have been changed.
Women's fiction is just a marketing category, designed to appeal more to women than to men. But there are stories in that category that any human being would like.
The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.
Your heart is known in Heaven,” the angel said. “And all that you are.
Q: What is wrong with the world? A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.
I learned not to be so bitterly defeated when my fiction took a beating from editors. I learned in advertising to color in the lines and have my work done on time and to make it the very best it could be.
Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thril...
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.
Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from the circumstances of their creation, and even apart from the intentions of their creator.
The future of fiction? he said. Maybe, she said. Will it have room for, you know, love & stuff? he said. Always, she said. OK then, he said.
I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.
Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.
The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.
When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.
Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.
It seems natural to surround my fictional world with animals because my reality is full of them. When I'm sitting there conceiving a story, they just pop up.
When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.
