I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.
Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary.
Having spent so much time in a fictional world, I prefer to read about the real world.
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing.
I'm always a little apprehensive about 'decoding' fictional stories.
Today's youth cannot miss something they have never known, but I fear that there are no current fictional characters whose impact and influence will last with such abiding affection into their 'sore and yellow' as this splendid man's creations have in mine!
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.
We live in a science fictional world with things like cloning and face transplants, and things seem to be getting stranger and stranger.
The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling.
I like New York. There are similarities with London that make it feel rather like home, but at the same time it's slightly fictional.
Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself.
I don't put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction - looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That's a science fictional tool.
We are talking about someone who has lived. It must be honored in every respect. The fictional can take any kind of channel - according to the actor's marriage to the character.
I've got no business giving advice to anyone. Even a fictional character.
I think there's a moral imperative when you're writing fictional heroes to give characters who somehow give us something to aspire to as opposed to dragging them down to our level.
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.
When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.
The real world is far more hellish for all us than any fictional representation of it.
We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had.
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.
My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
Time limits are fictional. Losing all sense of time is actually the way to reality. We use clocks and calendars for convenience sake, not because that kind of time is real.
In 'Shadow Tag,' Erdrich creates scenes from a fictional marriage, that of two American Indians, Irene and her painter husband Gil, that suggest some of the worst psychological torments and stresses of real life.
What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.
Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you're a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.
If the moral good of fiction stems mainly from a habit of mind it inculcates in the reader, styles are neither good nor bad, and to describe some fictional enterprises as false is pointless.
So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.
Both Springsteen and Michael Jackson, who had these huge productions, could always scale them back down to just a song and a melody. All of that influences me. I also try to be a fictional writer, and sometimes I get close, but the things that resonate the most with me - and with everyone else - is what's real.
'A Tuna Christmas' is the second in a series of plays created by Joe Sears and Jaston Williams featuring the fictional town of Greater Tuna, the third-smallest town in Texas. What makes these plays so hysterically funny is the accurate portrayal of small-town life in the Lone Star State.
