“The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come.” IfsThinkingWritingLongImportantMatterEnoughWaitingLinesChanceNovelProgressTenPaperComputerSentencesTechniqueCoffeeStuckShopsDescriptionHookJamChances AreNotebookCoffee Shop Author:Naomi Novik
“My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma. That's where I trace the familial line of murder mystery obsession.” DoeBookFactsMotherLinesNovelMysteryAdventureDadMurderMy DadObsessionSpyGrandmaMachoMy GrandmaMurder MysteriesAdventure BooksShoguns Author:Christopher Bollen
“There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.” WritingProcessLinesWalksNovelEmotionalFineDramaGenuineWriting ProcessFine LinesMelodramaManipulativeEmotional Power Author:Nicholas Sparks
“Freud believed that our dreams sometimes recapitulate a speech, a comment we've heard or something that we've read. I always had compositions in my dreams. They would be a joke, a piece of a novel, a witticism or a piece of dialogue from a play, and I would dream them. I would actually express them line by line in the dream. Sometimes after waking up I would remember a snatch or two and write them down. There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.” WantWritingTwoSometimesPlayDreamWould BeRememberLinesNovelPiecesHeardSpeechJokesWake UpDialogueCommentWakingCompositionOur Dreams Author:David Mamet
“a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.” WritingIdeasMatterStoriesGuyThreeStrongGrowsBornLinesNovelBearsRelationDiedComplexesUnconsciousChaptersSpidersTerrificSpunSpider Web Author:Katherine Paterson
“The plot is not very important to me, though a novel must have one, of course. It's just a line to hang the washing on.” ImportantCoursesLinesNovelPlotWashing Author:Ivy Compton-Burnett
“I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.” KnowsShowsOpportunitySocialLinesNovelTvsResearchWorkersHostReportersSocial WorkerTalk ShowsColumnists Author:Anna Quindlen
“I'm superstitious about the paper that I use, for example. I've written all my novels on a paper of a particular size with lines of a particular distance apart and with two holes in the paper for the folder clip.” TwoUseLinesNovelWrittenExampleParticularPaperDistanceSizeHolesSuperstitiousClipFoldersDistance Apart Author:Philip Pullman
“For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.” BitsLinesNovelIntegrityShapesParagraph Author:Paul Auster
“Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.” FilmLinesNovelClearStrikesMediumsFantasticBroadsSubtletyNuance Author:William Boyd
“I thought I could rely on the plot in the novel and fill in the colour between the lines, but I made a mistake with that assumption. It was really, really hard because you pull a few things apart and then you realise how everything relies on everything else and it can all fall apart.” MadeHardFallLinesMistakeNovelRelyAssumptionColourPlotRealisingFalling ApartMade A MistakeI Made A MistakeBetween The Lines Author:Ben Affleck
“Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.” ThinkingTryingFirstsBookFormDifficultLinesNovelParticularSubstitutes Author:Alice Sebold
“[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.” LightBitsChurchLinesNovelFocusedEggsStringsShellsLitAltarsKittenCongregation Author:H. G. Wells
“So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.” IfsWritingSeemsLinesFictionNovelSeparationUselessNon Fiction Author:Jamaica Kincaid
“It's disingenous for me to say that I wasn't trying to write a moral novel. By its very nature as a novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit steps into the political conversation. There's no way to avoid that. I can appreciate that readers are probably going to line up on one side of the novel or the other. I hope they go to those polar extremes, actually.” WayWritingTryingI CanWarPoliticalSidesLinesMoralStepsNovelReaderConversationAppreciateIraqExtremesIraq War Author:Dave Abrams
“I think I was also afraid of the novel. I write line by line, proceeding at snail's pace, rewriting as I go and paring the excess away. This is against all the best advice for writing long form prose, and I have tried over the years to break myself of the habit, but I can't bear to leave anything ungainly on the page and half the fun for me is that tinkering. So the length of a novel was a daunting prospect.” ThinkingWritingYearsLongI CanFormFunLinesHalfBreakNovelAdviceBearsHabitPagesProseLengthPaceExcessProceedingBest AdviceAll The BestRewritingSnailTinkering Author:Debra Dean
“The hardest thing in a novel is time. You've got [a line like] "two weeks later, he woke up with a headache," and you've got to add up that entire two weeks and what the date is and whether it works. That kind of stuff drives me crazy and if I don't have it exactly right, I can't move forward because I don't feel confident.” IfsFeelsKindI CanTwoMovingStuffLinesNovelWeekCrazyAddHardestMoving ForwardHardest ThingTwo WeeksHeadacheDrive Me Crazy Author:T.C. Boyle
“The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.” IfsWritingFirstsWholeLinesViewsNovelPoint Of ViewTitlesNonfictionDnaTenseVerbsSubplots Author:Mary Kay Zuravleff
“Now, as a reader, you shouldn't feel the decisions the writer makes about this DNA, or it would be boring beyond belief. But, as a writer, you're struggling to make these decisions. What should the title be? What's the first line? The point of view? And the struggle with the decisions is because you're trying to figure out WHAT IS THE NOVEL, WHAT IS THE NOVEL?” FeelsShouldTryingFirstsWould BeBeliefLinesDecisionViewsNovelStruggleFiguresReaderBoringPoint Of ViewTitlesDna Author:Mary Kay Zuravleff
“I can be really silly when I'm not actually writing silliness, and I have to rein that in. Pynchon, in my opinion, sometimes tells elaborate shaggy dog stories just to work up to a pun or punch line. My challenge is to use humor and wordplay to reinforce the emotional core of the novel.” WritingI CanSometimesStoriesUseChallengesLinesOpinionNovelDogEmotionalCoreSillyReinsPunWordplaySilliness Author:Mary Kay Zuravleff
“I really like the "two is better than three" line. People ask me is this drama or comedy? I just think the more colors you have to a film the better. The more genres, the more people will like it. I like relating to the whole general speaking public. The script itself is 99 pages but the novel it is based on is 600. I had to leave a lot of stuff out of the script. I had a limitation of what I could present on the big screen.” PeopleThinkingTwoWholeBigsFilmThreeAsksStuffLinesNovelComedyColorDramaPagesScriptsScreensLimitationGenreAsk MeBig Screen Author:Tommy Wiseau
“Maybe, just maybe, there should be a graphic novel dealing with the contribution of the women of the civil rights movement, to tell their story. The pain, the hurt. They raised their children. Some were working as maids, but when they left those kitchens, those homes, they made it to the mass meetings. And they put their bodies on the lines, also.” ShouldChildrenMadeStoriesHomeBodyPainLeftHurtLinesNovelRightsMovementMassMeetingsRaisedCivil RightsMade ItKitchenContributionGraphicCivil Rights MovementMaidsGraphic Novels Author:John Lewis
“The story line of my novel [The Kite Runner] is largely fictional. The characters were invented and the plot imagined.” CharacterStoriesLinesNovelPlotRunnersKites Author:Khaled Hosseini