Laura Amy Schlitz Quotes

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

Pacing is not the sort of thing you can plan out beforehand, but you're always aware of it as you write, because you need to make constant decisions.

I get the beginning. I get the end. Then I write the middle. That's how I do it.

The same way that some people can play the piano, I can do plots! They just come!

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 end, my reasons for moving down the timeline and introducing a new cast have more to do with keeping myself entertained, on the assumption that if I get bored, my readers are going to be even more bored.

When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.

I'm not like Jonathan Hickman, who's able to sort of plot out three years of a book ahead of time. I'm much more of a guy who plots out an arc or two at a time.

It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.

You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.

If you don't spend the time you need on developing characters and finding stories, complicated stories, the audience gets tired because they think they're seeing the same thing again and again.

I'm a huge believer in story being this invisible scaffolding that no one ever recognizes or realizes is actually making the audience engaged in what's going on. There is no formula for it.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

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

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can't skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what's going on.

As far as personal philosophies go, I think you should know your ending. I know that's radically different from a lot of other writers who just organically like to find the story. Other than that, I try different things and mess around. I'm still just playing a good bit.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.

My writing process is such that a story will be in my head for awhile, and I'll start making notes on my computer. I create character sheets that include a character's past, fears, goals and ambitions.

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 write short stories. I write every day.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.