A Quote by Sarah Weinman

There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee.

Sarah Weinman

Quote Topics

Adhere Approach Break Glee Mystery Novel Rules Them Two Two Ways Ways Writing

Quote Author

Sarah Weinman
American - Journalist

I'm disregarding all the rules I've seen as people approach writing music. I'm trying to break them.

Verite

The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.

Chuck Palahniuk

It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.

Lev Grossman

I think authors are just realizing there's no real reason to feel limited to a narrow set of genre rules in their writing. There's no reason a mystery novel can't have fantastic elements in it. Similarly, there's no reason why your epic fantasy series can't have elements of a mystery.

Patrick Rothfuss

'Glee Project' and 'Glee' have the same spirit, but they're both harder in their own ways. With 'Glee Project,' there's more pressure because you're being judged in everything you do. When you film 'Glee,' you go to the studio and have an off day, and it's OK - you're still going to be there; you take as many chances as you need.

Samuel Larsen

Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

Nicholson Baker

One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective.... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero.

Carolyn Wheat

D.H. Lawrence, I think, defined the difference between writing an article and writing a novel very well. He said, in writing a novel, the writer must be able to identify emotionally and intellectually with two or three or four contradicting perspectives and give each of them very a convincing voice. It's like playing tennis with yourself and you have to be on both sides of the yard. You have to be on both sides, or all sides if there are more than two sides.

Amos Oz

When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.

Malcolm Gladwell

I think that the essence of being an artist is to break rules. You have to learn rules, and you have to break them, because if you make art only by the rules, then you make very boring art.

Johann Johannsson

It's like, symbolic language, the way that people approach dense poetry... it always bugs me, because that approach suggests that it's like a mystery novel, and that if you can put together the clues, you can come up with one singular answer.

Carey Mercer

I have my own rules and adhere to them. The rule is simple but inflexible. A James Stewart picture must have two vital ingredients. It will be clean and it will involve the triumph of the underdog over the bully.

James Stewart

Rules matter, and to be rules they need to be universal in form: always do this, never do that. But it is foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that an occasion might arise when normal rules just don't apply. Rules are not there to be broken, but sometimes break them we must.

Julian Baggini

Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging.

Rhianna Pratchett

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

John Irving

Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it's always your turn - I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it's under way, there is a sense of flow.

Billy Collins

A Quote by Sarah Weinman

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors