Writers and Editors

The writer who survives by teaching writing may discover, however, that his teaching hurts his art. Dealing day in and day out with beginning writers, he finds himself forced continually to think in analytical fashion about problems he would normally solve in other ways. To make his student see clearly what is wrong in his or her fiction, the writer-teacher has no choice but to work in a fully conscious, intellectual way. Every writer at some point must go through an analytical period, but in time he must get his own characteristic solutions into his blood, so that when confronted by a problem in a novel he's writing he does not consult his literary background. He feels his way to the solution.
~ John Gardner

"All you need to write a ghost story is put a ghost in it. For a detective story you need a plot."
~ P.D. James

"The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen."
~ Mary Roberts Rinehart

"A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened without its science content."
~ Theodore Sturgeon

"I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation."
~ Raymond Carver

"I always heard, 'Write about what you know.' I disagree. I say, write about what you love. You can always research the rest. If you're going to live with a character and a place for months on end, you'd better love them. And the passion comes through. Editors are looking for passion."
~ Stephanie Barron, author of the Jane Austen mysteries (starting with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrove Manor)

"All my stories have been written with material that was gathered—no, God save us! Not gathered but absorbed—before I was fifteen years old."
~ Willa Cather

“The truth is that I do want I want to do,” novelist Walter Mosley told Clayton Moore, Mystery Strumpet on Bookslut. “If I want to write a political monograph, I write a political monograph and someone publishes it. No, it doesn’t sell like a traditional mystery, but I don’t care. I don’t write for that reason. If you want to make money, you should go into real estate, you know what I mean? If your love is writing books, that’s a passion that’s way outside of the umbrella of income.”

"It's not a good idea to try to put your wife into a novel . . . not your latest wife anyway."
~ Norman Mailer

"Perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The wastebasket is the writer's best friend."
~Isaac Bashevis Singer