Facts, facts, facts; there is nothing but facts. The writer’s first business is to get at these facts exactly —get the meat out of them— and then, by the most direct method, to transmit them to his readers. That is the whole substructure of literature; the groundwork —the anatomy.”
—Wolstan Dixey
The Trade of Authorship, 1888, p. 83
“It is not the task of a writer to ‘tell all,’ or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that’s the bastard chimera we call a ‘story.’ I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what’s left over.
“Houses Under The Sea”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan
