Diane Johnson Quotes

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

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

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.