Helen Dunmore Quotes

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

Once I have a hook I think has potential - enough to spin out more than a hundred thousand words, then I start turning my attention to characters. Who are these people? Why did this thing happen to them? But the hook always comes first.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.

I think the plasticity of the novel is its greatest challenge. There are no rules; there is no necessary form. You can know what you want it to be, or do, and still not know how to write it. There are endless possibilities, infinite choices. What voice should it be in? What events to start with? What characters will be part of it?