I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn’t a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.
I’m only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.
I have a book in the pipeline of short stories. You want to hear an agent scream, say ‘I’m thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.’
My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.
I hadn’t meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, ‘I’m a novelist. I know it.’ But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.
I’ve been writing short stories since I was a little girl.
I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.
I write all the time. I do artwork that’s part of a diary, and I write short stories to go with them pretty much every day.
I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels… a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.
I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic – hyper-realistic – stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn’t meld the two.
I’m mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
I’ve always written short stories.
I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.
The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren’t people categorized as crime writers. I’d say I learned more from John O’Hara, who isn’t much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.
Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn’t write a good poem… And then it actually wasn’t so bad.
Short stories are fiction’s R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.
Maybe it’s because I was named for him, but I’ve always wanted to meet Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s oversimplifying, but all Hawthorne’s short stories and novels are, in one way or another, about guilt. Something profoundly disturbing must have happened to him at an early age. I’d like to know what that was.
You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.
Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.
I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.
I was writing short stories aged seven or eight. I had a vivid, overactive imagination.
It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can’t just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren’t.
I saw the short stories people were doing on Kindle and really liked the idea of seeing something I’d written on that screen.
I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
Robert Louis Stevenson… I’m focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys’ author, but he’s not at all.
Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.
There are some short stories in R. Crumb comics that are just wonderful and touch me in ways no other comics do.
Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.
The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn’t always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine – they’re more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.
I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they’re so good. He doesn’t waste any words.
I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn’t know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.
I was 35 when I started taking classes at Ohio University. After I got my degree, I kept working at the mill. When I was 45, I decided I was going to try to learn how to write short stories.
I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story.
One of the things I am most excited about personally is a five-issue anthology I put together, ‘Legends of Red Sonja,’ which is full of wonderful little short stories written exclusively by my favorite female writers of comics, prose, and gaming.
I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.
I got into writing short stories and blogs while on the road.
I don’t think I’d have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I’d love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the ‘Zhuangzi’ is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It’s a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.
Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.
Yeah, I used to write short stories at first, but once you work on something, you want to show people. My peers weren’t interested in me reading 30-40 pages to them.
I used to publish these stories in 32-page comics, and I would either do short stories or break the long ones up into chunks so there would be some variety inside the comic. But since then, people have been doing more and more long, standalone works, and the term ‘graphic novel’ has sort of become the codified term now.
I went to classes on writing for film and theatre as well as short stories at Stanford.
I love short stories, but I’ve never had the impulse to write one. Same for ghost stories.
Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they’re short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.
Even when she was alive, Esther Kreitman’s novels, short stories and translations received far less attention than the work of her famous brothers, I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
When I first started ‘Humans of New York,’ I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn’t have time to make them anymore.
When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.
While my favorite book of short stories is Fredrick Brown’s ‘Nightmares and Geezenstacks,’ my favorite single story is ‘Sound of Thunder,’ by Ray Bradbury.
I started writing about New York as soon as I arrived. I was 19. I used to write short stories and send them out.
Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I’d just finished was horror, too.
Short stories, for me, it’s like you step inside this brand new car and you drive it and you drive it into a tree and you walk away from it.
I usually have about four books on the go – a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously.
