On Teaching and Writing Fiction Quotes

“By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging?”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a job for amateurs, dilettantes, part-time thinkers, 25-watt feelers, the lazy, the insensitive, or the imitative. It is for the creative, and creativity implies both talent and hard work.”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“and so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility. But isn’t it enough? For lack of the full heart’s desire, won’t it serve?”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won’t pay you a living wage for it?”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction