A Quote by Ed Greenwood

It's a trifle hard to surprise yourself with a story you've written.

Ed Greenwood

Quote Topics

Hard Story Surprise Trifle Written Yourself

Quote Author

Ed Greenwood
Canadian - Writer
Born: July 21, 1959

An important part of any good mystery story like 'Original Sin' is that it's not just a game of 'Clue' with surprise after surprise after surprise, but the goal is to tell a story in the midst of that. Even once you know the solution to the mysteries, it's far from the whole story.

Jason Aaron

Do something that surprises yourself cause if you don't surprise yourself, you're not going to surprise anybody else.

Logan Henderson

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

If as a child I had written a story, the best story that I could imagine, I would have written as indeed is happening to me.

Paolo Maldini

Who gives a trifle meanly is meaner than the trifle.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

I'm writing a new love story, set in eastern North Carolina. Surprise, surprise, huh?

Nicholas Sparks

You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do.

Jincy Willett

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

Seamus Heaney

Never think that Jesus commanded a trifle, nor dare to trifle with anything He has commanded.

Dwight L. Moody

I've never had a surprise birthday party. I've had every other type of surprise. I've had surprise beatings, surprise drug tests, surprise daughter I think.

Dave Attell

We live in a society that is in transition from oral to written. There are oral stories that are still there, not exactly in their full magnificence, but still strong in their differentness from written stories. Each mode has its ways and methods and rules. They can reinforce each other; this is the advantage my generation has - we can bring to the written story something of that energy of the story told by word of mouth.

Chinua Achebe

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

Rebecca Solnit

I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time. And then you can really surprise yourself. There's that cliche, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader!"

George Saunders

I really like it when you can step outside of what's come before and find a surprise for the reader and find a surprise for yourself.

Dave Gibbons

You have to fire yourself as the writer when you direct something you've written. You have to fire yourself, or else you get precious about what you've written. You've got to open up and let the actors in, and re-conceive a lot of things.