Janet Burroway > Quotes

“Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.”
― Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

“Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine distinctions of language, I seek the part of the mind I didn't know was there, the part 'sheer,' 'no-manfathomed,' 'cliffs of fall.”
― Janet Burroway

“The mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas and emotions have ideas and emotions more profound than the rest of us. It isn't so. The ability to express is a special gift with a special craft to support it and is spread fairly equally among the profound, the shallow, and the mediocre.”
― Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

“Don't dread. Do.”
― Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

“Specific, definite, concrete, particular details—these are the life of fiction. Details (as every good liar knows) are the stuff of persuasiveness.”
― Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft

“Literature offers us feelings for which we do not have to pay. It allows us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve; for even good feelings—intimacy, power, speed, drunkenness, passion—have consequences, and powerful feelings may risk powerful consequences”
― Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft

“I took a photograph out of an old frame to put in a picture of my new husband and stepdaughter. Because the frame was constructed in an amazingly solid way, I thought about the man whose photo I was displacing; his assumptions about permanence; how we use frames to try to capture and hang onto moments, memories, families, selves that are in fact always in flux; how we frame our cities with roads, our shorelines with resorts, our dead with coffins — marking our territory, claiming possession”
― Janet Burroway

“A writer is a kind of benevolent cannibal who eats the world - or at least one who will experience the world with an eye and ear toward what use can be made of it.”
― Janet Burroway, Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft

“diaphragm, heavy and unassailable by digestive”
― Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft