↓Skip to main content
  1. Dispatches/

Quote: Charlie Jane Anders on Sentences for Fiction

·57 words·1 min
Quotes Writing
Daniel Andrlik
Author
Daniel Andrlik lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia. By day he manages product teams. The rest of the time he is a podcast host and producer, writer of speculative fiction, a rabid reader, and a programmer.

People will advise you to write all sorts of sentences. Snappy sentences, lyrical sentences, Hemingway-esque short sentences, long Faulknerian sentences. But there’s really only one kind of sentence that actually works: a sentence that carries the reader forward from the previous sentence.

— Charlie Jane Anders, The Only Kind of Sentence You Should Use in Your Fiction

Related

Quote: Kelly Sue DeConnick on Feminism in Her Writing
·71 words·1 min
Quotes Feminism Culture Writing
I don’t actually set out to write political pamphlets. I’m always writing story first, and even before that I’m always writing character first – everything is born of character. But I think that I have some very strong feelings about some things; in particular, ideas of fairness and justice.
Quote: Chuck Wendig
·118 words·1 min
Quotes Publishing Writing
Write the thing you wanna write. You can be strategic and whatever, you can and maybe even should try to figure out what people want to read and what publishers are willing to buy, but at the end of the day, a whole lot of people in and around this industry know almost nothing for certain.
Quote: Robert Jackson Bennet
·50 words·1 min
Quotes Writing
Writing murder mysteries is largely a process of logistics, I think, ensuring that the timelines work and the right evidence gets in the right place at the right time. You essentially become the Jeff Bezos of killing dudes you just made up.