Heliand Publishing Corporation

Come read original new short story literature from authors who write in five specific genres: fantasy, medieval, mythology, psychological and religious/spiritual. If you are an author wanting to get his/her name known and you write short stories in one of the above mentioned genres, submit your work at www.heliandpublishing.com.

Faulkner and the Human Heart

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. - William Faulkner

Eternal Stories

Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember but the story. - Tim O'Brien

Exlamation Marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind. - Terry Pratchett

Tears in Writing

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. - Robert Lee Frost

The Odd Writer

The writer is odd from day one and in the course of pursuing this maddening profession becomes distinctly odder... It is not unusual for a successful writer - your favorite, the one you think of as full of sunshine, wisdom and laughter - to spend great portions of his or her life in a state of fury, hideously disappointed, or even raving mad... for a writer it is almost essential to pursue a solitary passion in the open air. - Paul Theroux

Oscar Wilde On Books

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. - Oscar Wilde

Twain On Written Things

Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible and will not lend themsleves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue--where their prupose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into commmon forms fo premeditated talk--otherwise they will bore the house and not entertain it. - Mark Twain

Words

For first you write a sentence, and then you chop it small; then mix the bits and sort them out just as they chance to fall: the order of the phrases makes no difference at all. - Lewis Carrol

Carrol and Alice

I learned long ago that being Lewis Carrol was infinitely more exciting than being Alice. - Joyce Carol Oates

Grammar and the Milky Way

I never delighted much in contemplating commas and colons, or in spelling or measureing symbols; but now... if I attempt to look at these little objects, I find my imagination, in spite of all my exertions, roaming in the Milky Way, among the nebulae, those mighty orbs, and stupendous orbits of suns, planets, satellites, and comets which compose incomprehensible universe; and if I don't sink into nothing in my own estimation, I feel an irrestistible impulse to fall on my knees, in adoration of the power that moves, wisdom that directs, and the benevolence that santifies the whole. - John Adams

Sleeping With a Book

When I'm near the end of a book, I need to sleep in the same room with it. - Joan Didion

Wandering

Not all who wander are lost. - JRR Tolkien

Silence

Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times. - Edward Abbey

Writing Better Than You Can

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can. - Ernest Hemingway

Affecting Your Reader

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish. - Robert Louis Stevenson

The Writing Adventure

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. - Winston Churchill

Hemingway and Critical Theory

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering. - Ernest Hemingway

Personal Life as a Writer

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. - Doris Lessing

Breathe, Cry and Sing in Writing

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. - Anais Nin

Fortune and Nature

To be a well-flavored man is the gift of fortune, but to write or read comes by nature. - William Shakespeare

Do Things

Either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing. - Benjamin Franklin

Doing Something Else

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. - Gloria Steinem

Live Life

In order to write about life, first you must live it! - Ernest Hemingway

Heliand Publishing Corporation

Come read original new short story literature from authors who write in five specific genres: fantasy, medieval, mythology, psychological and religious/spiritual. If you are an author wanting to get his/her name known and you write short stories in one of the above mentioned genres, submit your work at www.heliandpublishing.com.

Short Stories and Totality

Thus the Short-story has, what the Novel cannot have, the effect of "totality," as Poe called it, the unity of impression. - Brander Matthews

O'Connor on Freaks

In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature. - Flannery O'Connor

Writing and What-Is

What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them. - Flannery O’Connor

Poe on the Imagination

That the imagination has not been unjustly ranked as supreme among the mental faculties, appears from the intense consciousness, on the part of the imaginative man, that the faculty in question brings his soul often to a glimpse of things supernal and eternal-to the very verge of the great secrets. There are moments, indeed, in which he perceives the faint perfumes, and hears the melodies of a happier world. Some of the most profound knowledge-perhaps all very profound knowledge-has originated from a highly stimulated imagination. Great intellects guess well. The laws of Kepler were, professedly, guesses. - Edgar Allan Poe

Tolkien's Popularity

There is one possible reason for Tolkien's popularity that I would like to put forward, because it concerns the real strength of The Lord of the Rings. . . .

Tolkien believes in his world, and in all those who inhabit it. This is, of course, no guarantee of greatness-if Tolkien weren't a fine writer, it would not make him one-but it is something without which there is no greatness, in art or in anything else. . . . The failure of belief on the authors' part is, I think, what turns so many books . . . into the cramped little stages where varyingly fashionable marionettes jiggle and sing.

But I believe that Tolkien has wandered in Middle-earth, which exists nowhere but in himself, and I understand the sadness of the Elves, and I have seen Mordor. - Peter S. Beagle

Fantasy vs Science Fiction

While science fiction looks outward, fantasy looks inward-into ourselves, where wonder and wishes overcome knowledge, where belief rules over science. - Philip Martin

Flannery O'Connor on "Good Country People"

When I started writing that story, I didn’t know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden let in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, realized it was inevitable. - Flannery O'Connor

Anton Chekhov and Subjectivity

You abuse me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lack of ideals and ideas, and so on. You would have me, when I describe horse-thieves say: "Stealing horses is an evil." But that has been known for ages without my saying so. Let the jury judge them; it’s my job simply to show what sort of people they are. I write: you are dealing with horse-thieves, so let me tell you that they are not beggars but well-fed people, that they are people of a special cult, and that horse-stealing is not simply theft but a passion. Of course it would be pleasant to combine art with sermon, but for me personally it is extremely difficult and almost impossible, owing to the conditions of technique. You see, to depict horse-thieves in seven hundred lines I must all the time speak and think in their tone and feel in their spirit, otherwise, if I introduce subjectivity, the image becomes blurred and the story will not be as compact as all short stories ought to be. When I write, I reckon entirely upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in the story. - Anton Chekhov

Poe on a Short Stories Effect

A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents-he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very intitial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole compostiion there should be no word written, of which the tendancy, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. . . . Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided. - Edgar Allan Poe

Short Story of Action

By its very essence, the story, just as the anecdote, amasses its whole weight toward the ending. Like a bomb dropped from an airplane, it mut speed downwards so as to strike with its war-head full-force onthe target. I am speaking, of course, of the story of action. - B. M. Ejxenbaum

The Writer of Short Stories

"The writer of Short-stories must be concise, and compression, a vigorous compression, is essential. - Brander Matthews

Short Stories

I feel that short stories are superior to novels in that they can have a huge impact on an individual in a short amount of time. Whereas, novels take a long time to create such an impact.