“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”
~ Paul Theroux, 10 April 1941
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Tag Archives: fiction
Khaled Hosseini (b. Mar 4th): “Literary fiction is kept alive by women…”
4 Mar
“Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.”
~ Khaled Hosseini, b. 4 March 1965
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Neil Gaiman (b. November 10): “You get ideas from being bored” & other quotes on writing
10 Nov
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Neil Gaiman, born 10 November 1960, is an English author who writes short stories, novels, comic books, graphic novels and films. His novels include Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.
Quotes on writing
- Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
- Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
- You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.
- Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
- Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.
Taiye Selasi (b. November 2): “I write essays to clear my mind, fiction to open my heart.”
2 Nov
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Taiye Selasi, born 2 November 1979, is an English writer born to Nigerian and Ghanaian parents. She has published three collections of short stories and the novel, Ghana Must Go.
Quotes on writing:
- I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
- As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.
- The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.
- As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.
- I’ve written fiction for as long as I can remember; it’s always been my preferred form of play.
- I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.
- That’s what makes writer’s block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That’s beyond frightening.
- So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.
- I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are inaccurate, but that they’re incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn’t that it’s inaccurate, it’s that it’s incomplete.
Tim O’Brien (b. October 1): “Fiction is for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient.”
1 Oct
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Tim O’Brien (born 1 October 1946) is an American writer whose best known book is The Things They Carried, a collection of stories inspired by his wartime experiences in Vietnam. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 for Going After Cacciato.
Here are some of his observations on the shaping of stories:
- Fiction is for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient.
- Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.
- Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding.
- The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
- Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
Roald Dahl (b. September 13): “The life of a writer is absolute hell.”
13 Sep
“The life of a writer is absolute hell. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.”
~ Roald Dahl, b. 13 September 1916
Khaled Hosseini (b. Mar 04): “Literary fiction is kept alive by women…”
4 Mar
“Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.”
~ Khaled Hosseini, b. 4 March 1965
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Warning: This novel contains trace amounts of astrology!
19 May
The other day I was browsing through some recent Amazon reviews of my hard-boiled mystery thriller Harm’s Way. It was originally published years ago under a pseudonym at St. Martin’s Press, but I rewrote it in 2011 and self-published it under my own name, eventually offering it free in 2013 to pique interest in my other mystery/thrillers.
In one review the reader complained that Montreal wasn’t Los Angeles and I wasn’t Raymond Chandler. Although I’d suspected the latter already, I was still pleased he’d correctly identified a writer whose style I’d emulated in writing the novel.
The reader went on to grumble, however, that the novel contained too much cat, as well as too much astrology. Just to paint the big picture, my private investigator owned a cat which was savaged by a rogue Doberman in the first chapter, thus requiring the attentions of a lady vet with whom my hero subsequently became, um, intimately involved.
As for the astrology, my hero had a longstanding astrologer lady friend with whom he occasionally sought counsel. In the novel, astrology was discussed in two scenes totalling less than 1400 words; in a novel of approximately 80,000 words, that’s roughly 1.7%.
Although little more than a page and a half every hundred pages, it was obviously too much – constituting a near-toxic dose for my reader, whose belief system was apparently so challenged by those few pages that he fell into a fever of intolerance, almost shutting down his reading experience.
In all fairness, perhaps he does suffer from allergies – probably to cats, but maybe also to open-mindedness. There’s a lot of that going around. Even among some of my own friends, who know I’ve been a professional astrologer for 30 years, there’s this attitude: Practice astrology all you want with the kooks you call your clients, but when it comes to writing novels, please don’t inflict that nonsense on the rest of us.
Luckily, I’m still amused by the ignorance of people ever ready to criticize things they know nothing about. Ironically, many of astrology’s harshest critics never read any serious books on the subject, nor consulted professional astrologers. Everyone wants the easy route, and clearly it’s less effort to develop an uninformed opinion than an informed one. As Sir Isaac Newton chided a fellow scientist critical of Newton’s interest in astrology, Newton said, “Sir, I have studied the subject. You have not.”
Anyway, that review got me thinking… Do we now live in an age where the public’s attitude toward astrology is as virulent as its allergy to peanuts, shellfish and soy? Do I need a consumer label on my book covers, saying: “Warning! This novel contains trace amounts of astrology. Those of a fragile mind are cautioned to browse elsewhere less you catch a New Age virus.”
Good thing this particular reader hadn’t discovered my New Age noir mystery thriller Scorpio Rising, whose content dedicated to astrology, palmistry and other esoteric subjects runs to 10%. If he’d read that, he might have died of anaphylactic shock, and I’d be facing a lawsuit.
~~~
Alan Annand is an astrologer (Dipl-FAS, Dipl-ACVA) based in Toronto. He is also the author of several mystery thrillers, and some of his novels feature shockingly-realistic depictions of major and minor characters who are also astrologers.
Paul Theroux, b. Apr 10: “Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”
10 Apr
“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”
~ Paul Theroux, 10 April 1941
http://pinterest.com/pin/39406565461988907/
Mark Twain: “…You want them all to land in hell…”
23 Jan
“The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.”
~ MARK TWAIN
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