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Lynn Abbey Quote: 'For me, writing a short story ...'

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I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.
Sarah Hall
Tags: You Want Then
I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.
Gay Talese
Tags: People Like About
All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.
Manuel Puig
Tags: Like Them Need
In a short story, you can use someone - we're only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.
Rebecca Makkai
Tags: You More Than
I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal.
Sue Miller
Tags: Which Got School
At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'
Laurence Yep
After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.
Vikram Seth
Tags: Never Even Myself
I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel.
Geraldine McCaughrean
Tags: Like Because Play
Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
Lynn Abbey
Tags: Because More Get
Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
Nell Freudenberger
Tags: Kind Long She
You know, I once read a short story about how much you could tell about people from their shoes. You could tell where they had been, what they did, whether they were real walkers.
Elizabeth Edwards
Tags: You People About
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
Alice Munro
Tags: Best Me Want
Your opening should give the reader a person to focus on. In a short story, this person should turn up almost immediately; he should be integral to the story's main action; he should be an individual, not just a type. In a novel, the main character may take longer to appear: Anna Karenina doesn't show up in her own novel until chapter eighteen.
Nancy Kress
Tags: Just Up Your
My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
Kate Atkinson
Tags: Time Women Had
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I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.


Jim Harrison
Tags: Been Never Only
When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.
Mark Lawrence
Tags: Know Even Thought
Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.
Jane Gardam
Tags: Time You Like
I worked on 'Blue Peter' and 'Tonight' and lots of TV plays, filmed people like Rudolf Nureyev and Ted Heath, and ended up a senior cameraman with my own crew. I'd had my first short story published in 1947, and when my writing really started to take off I decided to go freelance, and eventually left the BBC in 1965.
Michael Bond
I loved 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.' I read it later as an adult, but I loved 'We Have Always Lived in a Castle.' And that brings you around to 'The Lottery.' You can't pretend - it's a lottery in which you draw a name and people die. That's a short story, but it's such an incredible short story.
Suzanne Collins
Tags: You People Always
Writing is much, much harder than taking pictures because you have to man-haul it all out of your insides.
Sally Mann
Tags: You Because Out