Writing Short Stories Quotes

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They’re very different, and I can’t do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I’ll learn something from them.

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.

I can’t be reading novels when I’m writing a novel, because somebody’s voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I’m writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

I’m one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn’t have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

Don’t wait for success, but for the respect and interest of those who read you. At the start it could be a classmate, someone who shares your interests. Before sending off the manuscript for a novel to a publishing house, it would be a good idea to try writing short stories, and publishing them in a local magazine.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

I think I’m someone who can prattle on a long time about something, which serves me well as a novelist, but it’s the enemy when I’m writing short stories.

You can write when you’re dyslexic, you just can’t read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.

I’ve been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it’s how you teach yourself to write.

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager – they all felt and keep feeling that I’m doing something wrong here.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.