Writing Quote: Not Born With The Novel-Writing Gift by Mark Twain

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No—that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a very little tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times. 

Mark Twain

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Writing Quote: You Can’t Do That In Fiction by Flannery O’Connor

It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

~Flannery O’Connor

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Ernest Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory” or "Theory of Omission" of Writing

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

 –Ernest Hemingway



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 Anton Chekhov’s “Gun Theory” of Writing

 

Chekhov’s gun is a literary technique in which any object given a special significance within a story has to be used at some later point. The technique comes from Anton Chekhov, who explained that a pistol hung on a wall in the first act of the play should be used at some time later in the story. If the gun isn’t used, then it serves no purpose and is a mere distraction — unless it is meant to be a red herring. The ideal situation for Chekhov’s gun is one in which the object is noted but partially forgotten in the first instance, and then becomes relevant later in the story.

The biggest misconception about Chekhov’s gun is that it is equivalent to foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is where the writer leaves little clues about future events in the narrative, which are more clearly understood after the event is known. Chekhov’s gun relates more to removing extraneous information and descriptions than layering clues in for the reader. If a loaded gun is described in the first act and never fired, there is no need to describe the gun at all, because it is irrelevant.

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