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A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

Lynn Abbey

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Lynn Abbey
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: September 8
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Peekskill
New York
Marilyn Lorraine Abbey
Story
Background
Stories
Backgrounds
Enough
Intuition
Writing
Specific
Good
Instinct
Ground
Short
Writer
Sketching

More quotes by Lynn Abbey

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I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
Lynn Abbey
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I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
Lynn Abbey
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Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.
Lynn Abbey
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For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.
Lynn Abbey
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When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.
Lynn Abbey
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That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.
Lynn Abbey
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The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.
Lynn Abbey
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I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.
Lynn Abbey
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Im always trolling for trivia.
Lynn Abbey
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There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.
Lynn Abbey
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My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
Lynn Abbey
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I'm dense when it comes to discouragement.
Lynn Abbey
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I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.
Lynn Abbey
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Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
Lynn Abbey
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Ideas aren't magical the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.
Lynn Abbey
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Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
Lynn Abbey
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If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.
Lynn Abbey
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I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.
Lynn Abbey
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I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.
Lynn Abbey
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One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.
Lynn Abbey