A Quote by Peter Turchi

The key of writing fiction isn't just to remove something that the reader or listener can easily imagine. It's not a matter of being coy, or withholding information. It's allowing for multiple possibilities, recognizing the complexity of human behavior, and making the world of a piece of fiction as marvelously confounding as the world we live in.

Peter Turchi

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Allowing Behavior Being Complexity Complexity Of Human Confounding Easily Fiction Human Human Behavior Imagine Information Just Key Listener Live Making Matter Multiple Piece Possibilities Reader Recognizing Remove Something Withholding Withholding Information World Writing Writing Fiction

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Peter Turchi
Author
Born: 1960

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story.

Rosemary Clement-Moore

Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference. In a way, if someone says this didn't feel exactly right, I don't care. But that is not okay to do in academia - it's not about feeling. You want to establish a pretty solid case. So did this allow me to express things differently? Absolutely. Another thing I've been thinking about as an academic: our writing style is expository, and in fiction, withholding information matters quite a bit. Withholding things in academia - there's no place for that!

Elliott Colla

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

Nadine Gordimer

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Alexander Chee

I've always believed in the power of rational thinking and behavior as the savior of the world, and science fiction as a powerful medium to encourage that, which explains my signature line, 'Let's save the world through science fiction.'

James Gunn

Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.

Vito Acconci

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

Jonathan Franzen

In fantasy and science fiction, world-building is an essential part of the story. But as a reader, I don't just want descriptions of food, clothing, and places. I want to understand the world to its core, through the eyes of those who live in it.

Sabaa Tahir

I think that, for physicians who want to become writers, they have the material, the smarts, they have the logic, they know the stories; it's just a matter of being able to connect with their emotional sides - that's the key to writing good fiction.

Tess Gerritsen

Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)

Charles Stross

Anchors aren't just creating fiction; they're becoming characters in the fiction they themselves create. In the world of TV channels, facts are presented like fiction, so governments aren't inconvenienced; fiction is presented like fact, so governments stay happy.

Ravish Kumar

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

David Foster Wallace

I'm an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn't matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.

Reid Scott

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

Arundhati Roy

The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.

George Pelecanos

A Quote by Peter Turchi

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