Lorrie Moore Quotes

There's a huge distance between who I am as a regular person and what takes place in my fiction.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

For me that's the magic of the printed page - we don't have to pay attention to the passage of time and focus in on the realities of these characters at a specific age or at a specific time in their lives, and we can play with that to our hearts' content.

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

Writing for me is not a premeditated act. It just happens - characters keep coming out of nowhere and doing things I never expected them to do. The most persistent and most productive of these has been Paul Christopher, whom I didn't expect to see again after he appeared in 'The Miernik Dossier.'

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.

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

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

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.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

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

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

The bane of my existence is the synopses that publishers request for a new novel or series. That's where I'm really producing fiction - my final book never ends up looking like the synopsis.

When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.

As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I know authors shouldn't play favorites with books, but 'Release Me' really is right up there for me. The characters truly came alive on the page and drove the story as much as I did from behind the scenes. It was a pleasure to write, and I'm so thrilled that it's the first of a trilogy because I get to spend more time with the characters.

You can write and write, but if you don't have someone who can nail that character, it's never going to live.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.

All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.

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.