Compelling Quote by Kathleen Rooney

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as…

— Sarah Dessen

I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else.

— Elizabeth Berg

This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations,…

— Walter Mosley

It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a…

— John Grisham

I researched fiction writing for months before I taught my first class, much of it looking for strong techniques from bestselling authors.

— James Thayer

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

— Michael Korda

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in…

— Robert Boswell

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes…

— Joan Didion

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Every first draft sucks, so when you have your favorite novel, and you're like, 'Wow, this is a masterpiece,' and then you write your…

— Tomi Adeyemi

Early on, I tried fiction, but I wasn't very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is thankfully sitting in a…

— David Grann

With fiction, there’s no reason why everything you write shouldn’t be amazing. Nobody’s stopping you from making up better stuff.

— Wells Tower