True Fiction

"Great stories tell themselves; Only bad stories have to be written."

I can't remember who said that first but it's perhaps my favorite quote about writing. It's the one I go back to time and time again when a book is killing me or a scene is hard because, frankly they shouldn't be.

For me, great stories are the ones that don't feel written at all--the stories that read as if they've always existed, fully formed, somewhere, and the writer simply had to pull them from in the universe and place them on the page.

I think about this all the time--especially when the writing isn't going well, when I've been working on the same scenes for days, when my book feels like a boulder I'm pushing up a hill.

I shouldn't have to work to make this stuff up! I tell myself, because it's the scenes that I sit down and write in ten minutes that always end up being my favorites

The scenes that take weeks always end up being cut.

People often ask me how long it takes to write a book, whether I write from an outline or just wing it...lots of stuff. And the truth is all of it varies. But this one fact remains the same. I try to tell the "least made-up" story possible. I try to tell stories that are true with plots and scenes that maybe you didn't predict when the book started but in hindsight you couldn't imagine the book without.

I try to tell stories that tell themselves. And then I try to get out of the way.

Now I don't know if I do that or not--but that's my goal, and for some reason I felt compelled to say so.

-Ally