Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Writing is a craft focused on structure and utility rather than just art.
In plain terms
Writing is like building something useful with your hands.
What can you take from it?
Treat writing as a practical craft to be built carefully.

Where it applies

  • creative writing
  • editing
  • literary critique

Putting it to work

  • focus on structure
  • edit for clarity
  • build with purpose

Questions to consider

  • Is writing art or a trade?
  • What makes a story well built?

Another view

Some literature aims purely for emotional expression over structure.

More from Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  1. Interviewer: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from jour…

    Permalink to quote #3
  2. I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.

    Permalink to quote #5
  3. In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions o…

    Permalink to quote #2

Related quotes

  1. I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.

    John ScottJohn Scott quote #1
  2. I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

    Will SelfWill Self quote #5
  3. About Jack Kerouac: 'That's not writing; That's typing.'

    Truman CapoteTruman Capote quote #8