A Quote by Alexander Chee

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

Alexander Chee

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Coincidence Novel People People Say Say Story Think Whenever

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Alexander Chee
American - Writer

But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story.

Katharine Weber

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

Alexander Chee

'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story.

Howard Jacobson

People don't like to say comic so they say Graphic Novel, despite the fact that I don't think the true Graphic Novel has been written anywhere.

Terry Pratchett

A romance novel is more than just a story in which two people fall in love. It's a very specific form of genre fiction. Not every story with a horse and a ranch in it is a Western; not every story with a murder in it is a mystery; and not every book that includes a love story can be classified as a romance novel.

Leigh Michaels

I think the success of every novel - if it's a novel of action - depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, 'Which are my big scenes?' and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through?

P. G. Wodehouse

I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

Tom Bissell

One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.

Yiyun Li

So it's a coincidence. Just like you said. Two rich parents with two rich kids at the same school. They're both killed in accidents. Why are you so interested?" "Because I don't like coincidence," Blunt replied. "In fact, I don't believe in coincidence. Where some people see coincidence, I see conspiracy. That's my job.

Anthony Horowitz

This is a good thing to say to film students. If there's a story point that you don't feel right about, that there's a question you have - "Does it really make sense?" Or, "Is that plausible? Is it implausible? Is it set up?" Or whatever. Go at it. Don't let it go. If there's a question in your mind, you're probably right. You probably do need to work on it and think about it more.

Annette Bening

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

Mark Twain

People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

Isaac Asimov

More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.

Candice Millard

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

Elizabeth Bowen

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

Romesh Gunesekera

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

Hugh Grant

A Quote by Alexander Chee

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