Cecelia Ahern Quotes

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

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.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I never outline my novels before I write. I do have a vague sense of beginning, middle, and end at the outset of each book, but for me, writing has always been a very character-driven process.

There are times that you have a plot in your head, but then you find that the characters don't want to do that. When you're looking at the story from the outside, you can create whatever twists and turns you want. But when you're writing, you're inside the characters' heads, and you see that they may be motivated to do something different.

I usually have a sense of where my characters are personally and ways in which they might transform throughout the novel. But I never know at the outset how the book will end, nor do I ever stick to my original plan.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.

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.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

The goal is to have every character take on a life of his or her own. Sometimes characters will come into the story that I haven't planned.

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.