With writing fiction, I’m either not courageous enough or just not suited for telling truths in a more conventional way. As an actor, I inhabit those characters as I’m writing them.
For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors – which is the logic of narratives in general – over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.
I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.
I’d rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don’t want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don’t want to be judgmental in the fiction.
According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you’re probably going to find me fairly limited.
I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can’t be like any other author’s really.
I think that’s what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There’s no melodrama; there’s no device, It’s just about a human being.
A play is fiction – and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
I’m always trying to make something that is impossible to film. Why would somebody just read a novel when they can see it on TV or in the cinema? I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel, you can get right inside somebody’s head.
When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader’s heart.
A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I’m creating a form of fiction.
Crime fiction is the new rock n’ roll.
‘Doctor Who’ is where my love of science fiction and fantasy started. I was introduced to it when I was 8, and I’m still an avid viewer.
New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.
I want to do some fiction writing, I’ve had some pretty good luck with short stories, I’d like to do a couple of larger things.
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature – science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.
The ‘interactive fiction’ format hasn’t changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn’t since 1700.
I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.
I’d probably be a super wealthy guy if I had sat around writing songs and getting them placed like everyone else I know. But I write songs about people or after I meet them and they’re somewhat biographical – they’re fiction but also non-fiction.
A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn’t read it.
I don’t think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn’t afraid of looking uncool – he wasn’t scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.
Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.
When you’re writing historical fiction, you have to think a little farther into the situation: what the average social interactions were, what was acceptable behavior. What did people think was fun, what did they find unhappy, and why?
I have no idea what my draw is for science fiction. I hope they come to me because they like complicated women. But I’ve never played the Bionic Woman. In ‘Sarah Connor’ and ‘Lost,’ I am not the orchestrator of what happens. I’ve played quite peripheral people.
The mysteriousness and mystique of space is such, that science fiction attempts to tantalize you by telling you a story that could possibly be out there and that’s the appeal of science fiction.
I think it’s Jerry’s masterful fiction writing.
I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.
Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It’s the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
Films, fiction, can encompass a whole global vision on a particular subject with any story, whatever it is. You can play the story in whatever country with whatever language in whatever style you want to tell the story in.
I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art.
Biographies never feel as real as the best fiction. There is such a discontinuity between the narrative and the material it comes from, which is always such a mixed bag of letters, recollections, and other data.
Yes, I enjoyed my share of fantasy fiction series and comics. Among superheroes, Spiderman was my favorite. I always had this fascination for costume-clad vigilante who would come and save the day!
Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they’re asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.
I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.
At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, ‘Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.’
When I die, I’m gonna leave my body to science fiction.
With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
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.
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it’s always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.
The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a lot of poetry there.
The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
I get offered a lot of science fiction work and there is a new project in the pipeline called Master Race, set in World War II, but that’s a little way off yet.
I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.
We’re a very imaginative species; we’re very good at creating fictions.
I write fiction. I make things up, it’s what I do.
When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who’d get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.
Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.
Aren’t most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women.
The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama’s view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.
