Common Quote by Roy Kesey

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a…

— Len Wein

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

— Etgar Keret

Personally, one of the most helpful things I learned was three-act structure. For my first four or so novels, I built the structure intuitively.

— Marcus Sakey

Any time I put together a story collection, I don't know what it's going to look like overall - or even what the title…

— Brian Evenson

Ordering is difficult. It's like arranging pieces of music in a concert: What do you put first? What do you put after the intermission?…

— Lydia Davis

Each piece I tell stands on its own, and then it all ties together. It segues from story to story, and then I wrap…

— Ron Shock

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.

— Jo Nesbo

I love creating individual short stories within chapters, but I want to get better at building consistent narratives from start to finish.

— David Crabb

I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the…

— Jess Walter

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you…

— H. W. Brands

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised…

— Barry Schwartz

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have…

— Dan Jenkins