“Novels take me a long time; short fiction provides a kind of immediate gratification—the relationship of sketches to battle paintings.”
Donald Barthelme
more infosource: Interview with Larry McCaffery (1980), in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 261.
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category: creative process, fiction, novel, writing
medium: Interview
“Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them. I stroll out there into the emptiness of the pit and ask them for music. Who knows what they’re going to give me?”
Colum McCann
more infosource: “This Week in Fiction: Colum McCann,” by Deborah Treisman, The Book Bench blog, New Yorker, April 9, 2012.
category: conductor, fiction, music, writing
medium: Interview
“The etymology of fiction is from fingere (participle fictum), meaning ‘to shape, fashion, form, or mold.’ Any verbal account is a fashioning and shaping of events.”
David Shields
more infosource: Reality Hunger (New York: Random House, 2010), 10.
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category: creativity, fiction, language, Latin, writing
medium: Literary criticism
“It’s only now and then, maybe once every three or four days, that I manage to write a sentence in which I hear that wonderful harmonic chime that you get when, say, you flick the edge of a wine glass with a fingernail. That’s what keeps me going.”
John Banville
more infosource: “The Art of Fiction No. 200,” interviewed by Belinda McKeon, in Issue 188 of The Paris Review, 2009.
category: creative process, fiction, satisfaction, sentence, writing
medium: interview
notes: view transcript here
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