A Quote by Lisa Scottoline

I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.

Lisa Scottoline

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Funny Albeit Because Both Bottom Bottom Line Challenges Come Come Up Credible Fiction Funny Way Hard Line Love Memoir Plot Profound Say Something True Unique Up Way Writing

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Lisa Scottoline
American - Author
Born: July 1, 1955

I can be very snobby about fiction, especially contemporary fiction. I can be kind of overly demanding, I think. But this is, I think, a good time. A lot of fiction comes out right now. So, I like reading the memoir. I love memoir, the biography, auto bio.

Annette Bening

Going from memoir to fiction was fantastic. I had been afraid to move away from memoir; I'd written some novel drafts, but they weren't well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that "memoir outsells fiction two to one" (not sure if that's true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate.

Janice Erlbaum

Maybe that's the foundation of my book: how do we come to terms with the death of someone we love when it is impossible to come to terms with such a profound loss? The path I found where I could even ask that question, or maybe advance it beyond what I'd attempted in A Year and a Day, was by straddling the line: this is fiction and memoir, it is true and it isn't.

Leslie Pietrzyk

A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.

Julia Glass

I you're writing memoir, but it even comes up in fiction. People just assume that you're writing thinly veiled autobiography. And particularly, I think, for people of color, our work is always seen as kind of anthropological artifact regardless. So, there's always going to be that assumption, but even more so in a memoir because often the names aren't even changed. It is easier to verify.

Faith Adiele

I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.

Armistead Maupin

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

Elizabeth Gilbert

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

Isabel Allende

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Roxane Gay

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.

Ted Chiang

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

Joanna Scott

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

Francisco Goldman

Sometimes when we label something dystopian fiction, I feel like we're trying very hard not to use the words 'science fiction,' because science fiction has those horrible connotations of rocket ships and bodacious babes.

Paolo Bacigalupi

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

Sue Monk Kidd

Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are "plot-driven," as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there's something artificial, fraudulent, contrived.

James N. Frey

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A Quote by Lisa Scottoline

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