fiction

“The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” Agatha Christie

Women over 45 love books – it's time the book trade loved them back COMMENTMAY 24, 2022BY HARRIET EVANS Patronised, pigeonholed and ignored, women over 45 are buoying up book sales but are rarely consulted or celebrated in publishing. I wasn’t surprised last week at a literary festival when...

Here is Mushens Entertainment agency's advice on wordcount per genre with also an internal link to advice for children's fiction. https://www.mushens-entertainment.com/blog/how-to-edit-word-count

New blog post by Claire G – discussions in this thread, please --- Well, it sort of is… I’ve been fascinated by dystopian fiction for many years – any story which explores a dramatic change in the way of life for a society, if not humanity (which can of course cross into the post-apocalyptic...

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.' Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf

The fiction writer’s ambition is modest and overweening: to take the imprint of the passing moment, capture it in the right words, keep it for the future to read. Tess Hadley dley

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve. Denise Mina

Fiction and poetry are medicines: they heal the rupture reality makes on the imagination. Jeanette Winterson

Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life. James N. Frey

“Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.“ Clive James

'Fiction is not a dream. Nor is it guesswork. It is imagining based on facts, and the facts must be accurate or the work of imagining will not stand up.' Margaret Culkin Banning

“I think fiction is fundamentally an act of sharing, of intimate human communion. There’s no limit to its intimacy, nor its candour. To be drawn into a story is like receiving an embrace, to know you are not alone. Readers may begin a novel feeling at first that they’re entering a foreign...

Fiction is lies; we’re writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of...

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches...

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. Neil Gaiman

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen. Harry Turtledove

I recently put up a piece in the Writing Groups that used a lot of a brackets (like the ones around these words here). The reaction was interesting. Some didn't mention them at all, but those that did (half or more) hated them. Nobody said they liked them. Books I've read recently that use them...

Hello, I've just joined Litopia and am looking forward to meeting fellow-writers. I work in international education, but my true passion is, and always has been, writing. I have been agented before, but seem to be jinxed in that department ... my last literary agent had to close down his...

I am the author of a new children’s novel based in a magical fantasy world. I’ve even been brave enough to submit my opening for discussion at the pop-up. Here’s hoping 2018 is the year my whole will light up when I see it in print. “No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you...