#fiction

I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, by manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool. ↗

— Lev Grossman

#fandom #fanfiction #anger

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#books #deception #fiction #lies #novels

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#fiction #on-fiction #talent #value #vocation

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#art #disaster #fiction #films #oldest

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel. ↗

— Eudora Welty

#fiction #novels #writing #art

The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#art

Sometimes there are entire chapters written beneath someone's whisper. ↗

— Jake Wilson

#metafiction #writing #art

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot is too much or too little. And there is no better place to find answers than in the Victoria's Secret catalogue--or in any ad for lingerie--where the arts of seduction and revelation are so successfully practiced. After all, the secret of the effective lingerie ad is the secret of effective storytelling--to provide, moment by moment, the illusion of imminent expose, to give the viewer (read: reader) the uncanny sense that something fundamentally compelling is always just about to be revealed. Lingerie ads and storytelling balance the veiled and the unveiled, the seen and the unseen, the shown and the about-to-be-shown. In short, it is the art of the tease, the craft of selective 'coverage,' that, not just in lingerie but in storytelling, works to enthrall. ↗

— Julie Checkoway

#fiction-writing #novel-writing #on-fiction #art

I never look at a painting and ask, "Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?" It's just a painting. ↗

— Scott McClanahan

#fiction #fictional #nonfiction #paintings #art

When I'm writing, really writing, everything but breathing is an ignorable distraction. ↗

— Dennis R. Miller

#how-to-write #on-writing #on-writing-fiction #art