“I really want to write a novel. A few years ago I went so far as to do the cliché thing and rent this house in upstate [New York]. I still have the story, but I got 15,000, 20,000 words in and it was like, This is falling apart. I can't figure out.” WantWritingYearsStillsI CanStoriesFallHouseNovelFiguresNew YorkYears AgoFalling ApartUpstate New York Author:Craig Finn
“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
“Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.” NeedsWritingYearsIdeasStoriesPleasureSecretNovelCommitmentShort StoryGood IdeasScratches Author:Debra Dean
“If you had told me twenty years ago that I would write a novel set in Russia, much less two, I simply wouldn't have believed you. I had no familiarity with Russia or its history, but part of what drives me as a reader, and more and more as a writer, is curiosity, the desire to explore unfamiliar terrain and inhabit alternate lives.” IfsWritingYearsTwoDesireNovelReaderYears AgoTwentiesCuriosityRussiaFamiliarityUnfamiliarTerrain Author:Debra Dean
“I don't think about the reader in any conscious way that impacts the writing, as far as, Hey, most readers would like this! But at the same time, if it were presented to me: "John, you're going to write a novel. It's going to take you a few years. When you're done with it, there's a law that no one's allowed to read it." I don't think I would write it. I want someone to read it!” IfsThinkingWayWantWritingYearsDoneLawNovelReaderConsciousImpactHey Author:John Brandon
“My first book published in France was translated and titled Exercices d'Attente in 1972. It was a collection of short works written and published in Romania. In 1973 I was ready to publish the novel Arpièges, which I had started writing in Romanian and of which I had published some fragments under the title Vain Art of the Fugue. Some years later, I finished Necessary Marriage.” WritingYearsFirstsArtBookNovelWrittenReadyFinishedFranceVainTitlesCollectionsFragmentsPublishRomaniaFugue Author:Dumitru Tepeneag
“I read a script or I read a project or I read a novel and I know that I'm going to spend two to three years of my life with that, exclusively. So you better like it. There better be an honorable, real need to make that movie.” KnowsNeedsYearsTwoRealThreeNovelProjectsScriptsThree YearsHonorable Author:Robert Schwentke
“In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now - a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel.” WritingYearsWarStatesStuffProcessUnitedUnited StatesNovelHappenedConceptsDestructionTwentiesTerrorismTerroristEnormousDestroyedDirty Author:Junot Diaz
“It's really the story of a young woman, or two women, growing up in Naples in a poor neighborhood. The way that they get out of it - or don't get out of it - that's part of it. But it's also the story of the mid-20th century in Italy so it's really like a social, historical and personal novel. I think that even though I didn't live in Italy in those years, it did cover that same type of generational upbringing that someone like me might've had in America.” ThinkingWayYearsTwoStoriesMightAmericaYoungSocialPoorNovelGrowing UpGrowingCenturyTypeHistoricalLike MeNeighborhoodYoung Women20th CenturyUpbringingNaplesPoor Neighborhoods Author:Ann Goldstein
“At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments.” YearsKindLongFormNovelModernPossibilityCoupleHundredFavorsAll KindsProseSentimentsAbandonedEmergenceModern Novel Author:Teju Cole
“Most books germinate within you for a long time before they are ready to come out. I wrote several drafts of the novel over many years and when I finally got to the last one, it didn't take much time.” YearsLongBookLastsNovelReadyLong TimeWithin You Author:Pankaj Mishra
“The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.” WritingYearsNovelRiskMysteryPossibility Author:Dana Spiotta
“I had no idea Savage Season was the beginning of a series. I wrote the second one about three years later. The character of Hap wouldn't stop talking to me, and then there was a third, and over the years nine novels and a collection of stories and some uncollected stories.” YearsIdeasCharacterStoriesThreeTalkingNovelThirdsSeasonsSeriesNineNo IdeaCollectionsThree YearsSavages Author:Joe R. Lansdale
“I know the Pollock novel. Read it last year and liked it. Daniel Woodrell is awesome. I especially like the book Winter's Bone, and the film made from it. Larry Brown is terrific, all his work, but for me Joe in particular, also a good film, but a much better novel.” KnowsYearsMadeBookLastsFilmNovelParticularWinterBonesBrownLast YearTerrificLarryGood FilmsPollock Author:Joe R. Lansdale
“I think I can safely call 2012 average. Overall, it was a stronger year for nonfiction than fiction - a situation that would've surprised me back in January, when I was looking forward to big new novels from several authors I really love.” ThinkingYearsI CanBigsFictionSituationNovelStrongerAverageNonfictionLooking ForwardJanuary Author:David Edelstein
“Sophie [Kinsella]'s writing just captivated me. We bought this eight years ago, before it became an international success and was only one book. Now there's five. So, we were very fortunate to latch onto a character who has since become an international success both as a novel and hopefully now as a movie.” WritingYearsBookCharacterNovelFiveYears AgoInternationalEightHopefullyFortunateSophieCaptivatedLatches Author:Jerry Bruckheimer
“I'm working on different fields. One of my next books Insha'Allah will be a novel because it's important to explore the heart and imagination, the spiritual side. I've been working for twenty five years in the legal field and now I'm reaching what I want, which is an Islamic applied ethics and I'm also dealing with Muslims in the West.” WantYearsHeartImportantBookDifferentSpiritualNextSidesImaginationNovelFiveFieldsEthicsTwentiesWestIslamicFive YearsReachingTwenty Five Author:Tariq Ramadan
“When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.” WritingTryingYearsLittlesStillsBookPlaySeemsNovelPoetCouplePagesHundredTwentiesSevenVery GoodDeterminedNineNovelistsFifteenNine YearsNineteenFunny Book Book:Conversations with Edward Albee Source: Conversations with Edward Albee
“In 2004, I took a one year sabbatical to finish my second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. At the end of that year, I was not done with my book, and had to in effect resign from work. I did. I never went back.” YearsBookEndsDoneNovelSunEffectsThousandSplendidSabbaticalThousand Splendid Suns Author:Khaled Hosseini
“When I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and I tell my government, "You should not do that, you should do this." They don't listen to me, but I've been doing this for sixty years now. But, when I write a novel, I am not in that business.” NeedsShouldWritingYearsGovernmentSidesNovelNewspapersArticlesSixtyListen To Me Author:Amos Oz
“When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. And, sometimes in very, very different places, because we all come from somewhere, especially here in Israel.” YearsDifferentSometimesFactsLastsNovelIsraelSeventiesDifferent Place Author:Amos Oz
“A little more than a hundred years ago, "Tel Aviv" was not a city. It was a title of a novel written by an author. The "Return to Zion" was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no country. There was no state. There was no nation. There was no physical Jewish reality in this country.” YearsLittlesCountryStatesRealityNamesNationsCitiesNovelWrittenReturnHundredYears AgoTitlesBookshelvesZion Author:Amos Oz
“We [me and husband ] had been learning about the Khazars, and I had read Michael Chabon's novel [Gentlemen of the Road] the year before, so all these things are kind of roiling around in my brain, and then I slipped on the ice and I broke my wrist, and it had to be surgically repaired.” YearsKindBrainNovelHusbandIceBrokeGentlemanWrists Author:Emily Barton