A Quote by Bobbie Ann Mason

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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About Autobiographical Childhood Early Little Made Made It Mystery Novel Seventies Started Story Writing

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Bobbie Ann Mason
American - Novelist
Born: May 1, 1940

'Bless Me, Ultima' is quite autobiographical in the sense that I was writing a story about my childhood, my hometown where I grew up, Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on Old Highway 66 and the Pecos River. So a great deal of that environment, landscape, people, got thrown in the novel.

Rudolfo Anaya

I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.

James Rollins

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

Ben Marcus

I started writing when I was a journalist. But every time I sat down to write a novel or a story, I ended up writing about myself, which was incredibly annoying and self-involved.

Damian Barr

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

John Banville

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

Matthew McGrory

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

Dan Chaon

A lot of journalists are talented enough to write a mystery novel, and I would say that most of the top-end mystery writers actually started out as reporters. But there is more to it than just the writing; there's a learning process, and most journalists aren't willing to do it.

John Sandford

Writing fiction lets you be a little more emotional and unguarded, a little freer. Writing fictional characters is also really different from writing about real people. In nonfiction, you can only say so much about the people you interact with. After all, they're actual people, their version of their story trumps yours. In a novel, you can build a character, using certain parts or impressions of someone you know, and guessing or inventing others, without having to worry that your guesses or memories or inventions are wrong.

Elif Batuman

The most autobiographical thing I've ever written is my second novel, called 'An Ocean in Iowa.' That is pretty close to my childhood.

Peter Hedges

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

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

Colson Whitehead

I thought, "Well, I'm writing about early childhood, so maybe it would make sense to write about late childhood as well, early adulthood." Those were my thoughts, and this was how this crazy book [Winter Journal] was composed. I've never seen a book with pictures like at the end, pictures related to things you've read before.

Paul Auster

In the case of my second film The Fish Child (El Niño Pez), I had written the novel about 5 years before I made into a film. In the case of The German Doctor I had published the novel a year before I started writing the script, I even had another project to shoot. But I had this idea of the powerful cinematic language from the novel that I couldn't let go of.

Lucia Puenzo

I've been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not a memoir. One reason is the great love of novels that I keep droning on about. I've always loved reading novels. I've wanted to write novels since I was little. I started my first novel when I was seven.I don't have the same connection to memoir or nonfiction or essays. Writing nonfiction makes me feel a little bit as if I'm producing a product I don't consume - it's a really alienating feeling.

Elif Batuman

There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.

Paul Auster

A Quote by Bobbie Ann Mason

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