A Quote by Tobias Wolff

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

Tobias Wolff

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Everything First Order Pulling Really Short Short Story Story Weight

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Tobias Wolff
American - Novelist
Born: June 19, 1945

I have had, like most women, a lifelong preoccupation with my weight. My first published short story was a love story between an elderly man and a very young morbidity obese woman.

Lori Lansens

I decided to make myself a little less precious with my storytelling. I think you can see from the first three pieces in the book that I have a long term relationship with the short story as a form and I really love an elegantly crafted story that has several elements that come together in a way that is emotionally complex and different from when we started. That kind of crystalline, perfect, idealized thing that the short story as a genre has come to represent.

Lucy Corin

I really believe that when you're playing a character that everything is contained in the script. If I'm pulling from things from my own life, then I think I'm being disingenuous to the character and the story.

Walton Goggins

It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.

Edna Ferber

I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.

Lynn Coady

In March of 2001, I revisited the short story, and found that thought it did not work well as a short story, it might work much better as a longer one. The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

Khaled Hosseini

There is only so much you can do if you're pulling weight and there's nobody there to play off of. You can't have those beautiful moments with new actors who are so worried about everything else but the moment.

Dawn Olivieri

I think I know I've been working very hard for the family business, sometimes those days are long days and I think if I know I'm working hard and pulling my weight, both working and playing hard at the same time, I think everyone who I work with can see I am there pulling my weight.

Kate Middleton

The first song I wrote, when I was 8, was about feeling really angry - like the weight of everything on my shoulders.

Adrianne Lenker

I really believe that we all have the ability to come out of our story. But you have to tell your story first in order to come out of it.

Mariel Hemingway

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.

Walter Mosley

Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?

Ira Glass

My first short story sale was to a magazine that sat on the story forever... and never did publish it.

Cullen Bunn

They were a very good form for me - the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to - and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have.

Tara Westover

I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.

Ian Rankin

It used to be that you would go into a writing program and what you would learn was how to write a short story. You would pick up the magazines and you would be taught from the magazines how to write a short story. Nowadays student writers are learning to write novels because that market is gone, so the ones who are drawn to the form are doing it really for reasons of their own and that's really exciting.

Lorin Stein

A Quote by Tobias Wolff

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