Eric Jerome Dickey Quotes

When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

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

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story.

'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.

No, you don't have to start your play with a premise. You can start with a character or an incident, or even a simple thought. This thought or incident grows, and the story slowly unfolds itself. You have time to find your premise in the mass of your material later. The important thing is to find it.

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.

It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining.

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you're miserable and working out.

The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.

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.

Everything you write makes you better. But if you really need a tip, here's one: a good story begins in opposition to its ending. That means you work out how it finishes first, and then begin the story as far away from that point - in terms of character development - as you can.

The process of writing a story isn't about fair. It's about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong.

I was commissioned to write some romantic fiction, and I really liked doing those, and they were very instructive in terms of building characters and plots. But it never felt right for me.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

My forte is the plotting. You sit down, and you work out a plot.

The idea of having different characters is really just to get the storyline across, you know? Coming from one particular character makes, to me, the story boring. I get that mainly from novels and that style of writing or movies where there's multiple characters who carry the storyline.

You don't want to write the same story again, but people are like 'We want the same story but different.' Well, how do you do that?

I don't plot with huge detail, just big moments and important elements, and then I have a structure but can fly by the seat of my pants when I write.

I always struggle with making the technical aspects of the plot fit with the story that's unfolding in my imagination.