Janet Fitch Quotes

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Janet Fitch

Profession : Author

Birth : November 9, 1955

Your protagonist is your reader's portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you're creating. They don't have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

Janet Fitch

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

Janet Fitch

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers.

Janet Fitch

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.

Janet Fitch

As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.

Janet Fitch

Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.

Janet Fitch

It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building.

Janet Fitch

A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.

Janet Fitch

Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.

Janet Fitch

Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.

Janet Fitch

I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.

Janet Fitch

I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them.

Janet Fitch

I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.

Janet Fitch

I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.

Janet Fitch

My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky.

Janet Fitch

My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.

Janet Fitch

Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.

Janet Fitch

You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.

Janet Fitch

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.

Janet Fitch

I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.

Janet Fitch