Many of us may not know too much about our characters, but we tell the reader altogether too much.
Life, I announced, is not a B picture. Well, it ain’t no De Mille epic either, boss. Things’ll work out, Bernie.
Being broke is not a crime, nor is it proof of one’s inadequacy as a writer or as a human being. If you go around with an attitude of implicit apology for being temporarily without funds, it’s going to do you more harm than good.
I looked down into my glass. It held club soda, but the way I was gazing into it you’d have thought it was filled with something stronger. I used to stare like that into glasses of whiskey, as if they contained coded answers. All they did was dissolve the questions, but there was a time when that was enough.
Well, you live and you learn, and generally in that order. I.
You got to ask a street question to get a street answer.
I haven’t seen her in five years. Well, hell, I haven’t had a cigarette in twelve, and I damn well wanted one for a minute there. Sometimes I don’t think anybody ever gets over anything.
But whenever there’s the right kind of nut making headlines, a Slasher or an Icepick Prowler, a certain number of people get pistol permits and a certain number of others buy illegal guns. Then some of them get drunk and shoot their wives. None of them ever seems to wind up nailing the Slasher. I.
Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he’d come to realize, was a forgiving nature.
He was always inclined to be a moody man, very exuberant when things were going right, very depressed when they weren’t.
Hopper was neither an illustrator nor a narrative painter. His paintings don’t tell stories. What they do is suggest – powerfully, irresistibly – that there are stories within them, waiting to be told. He shows us a moment in time, arrayed on a canvas; there’s clearly a past and a future, but it’s our task to find it for ourselves.
I rode to the fourth floor, poked around until I found the stairway, and walked down a flight. I almost always do this and I sometimes wonder why. I think someone must have done it in a movie once and I was evidently impressed, but it’s really a waste of time, especially when the elevator in question is self-service.
I told Carolyn it was a great day for running, and she told me there was no such thing.
Tomorrow’s always there, just over the horizon. Until the tomorrows run out.
I see,” I said, which is something I very often say when I don’t.
They’ve transformed the weather into some sort of celestial crap game.
If you are lying, you have built your lie on true foundations.
It took a while to tell but it hadn’t taken all that long to live;.
Wasn’t it Will Rogers who said he never met a man he didn’t like?” “Whoever it was, I’d say he didn’t get out much.
If you are trying to write realistic fiction and you people it extensively with overdrawn characters, you’re working against yourself. You can occasionally get away with filling books and stories with grotesques, but unless your name’s Carson McCullers it gets tricky. A less obvious form of caricature consists of giving an otherwise ordinary character a trait or attribute or mannerism on which the reader may focus his attention.
While at SMLA, I wrote a science fiction short-short called “Make A Prison.” It worked its way all the way down to the very bottom of the S-F food chain, finally selling to Bob Lowndes at Original Science Fiction Stories for a half cent a word, then wound up in Judith Merril’s prestigious annual anthology. I was elated – but I never wrote another piece of science fiction.