“I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.” IfsWritingBookCharacterMovingPurposeBehindsReaderComfortablePagesUltimateSmellBlockNovelistsPlotOutlinesPhonyPlausibleSynopsis Author:Clive Cussler
“A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.” CommunicationPagesNovelists Author:Yann Martel
“Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist.” PeopleThinkingKnowsWorldShouldYearsWellsLooksHas BeensTwoHappensThreeVoiceWonderNovelDemandPagesPicksHundredWindowNovelistsRedefining Author:Mordecai Richler
“A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.” WritingKindLongPoetPagesWideNovelistsReviewsArticlesLecturesInterruptionsPerniciousCorrespondenceConsecutive Author:Shirley Hazzard
“The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.” ThinkingKindStatesMomentsHappensLossPoetHigherPeriodsPagesAccessCombinationNovelistsPhrasesSurprisingParagraphRaptureBest Moments Author:Don DeLillo
“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
“I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.” KnowsBelieveSaidBookTurnsI BelieveSecretNovelWrittenFiguresPagesSurfaceSatisfiedNovelistsExposed Author:Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.” IfsMindFirstsSaidBookHappensReadingMemoriesForeverSawsJourneyPagesSightBoxesThings HappenIceOddNovelistsReading BooksCreamIce CreamPrintedCollectingOdd ThingsInkheart Book:Inkheart Source: Inkheart
“This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. . . . Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. . . . Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.” GivingHeartCountryThreeInterestingStudyHappenedPagesHundredDecidedSuicideMiseryRateCommitNovelistsHopelessGrayOptimistEighty Author:P. G. Wodehouse
“Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.” PeopleWorldChildrenBookEndsSometimesWholeDiesOur LivesNormalPagesWhole LifeNovelistsThank U Author:Carlos Ruiz Zafon
“Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.” WorldChildrenWarMotherNumbersFictionCenturyReaderNeededSixPagesSpringLaborRateDefeatConversionTricksNovelistsWar Of The WorldsCarrieVacationWorld War IStairsParagraphSyllablesTime PassesSagaNarratorsLabor DayRefreshmentsEscalators Book:Generosity: An Enhancement Source: Generosity: An Enhancement