Andy Weir Quotes

All the stories in 'The UnAmericans' required interviews, travel, hours and hours in the archives. All of that stuff is so important in the beginning, but I reach a point where I have to shuck it away.

If I get blocked, it is generally because I don't know enough about some aspect of the story or the characters. The answer for this is generally more research, or making more background notes, so the place and person can be more fully realized inside my own mind.

I believe in research. Each movie at Pixar involves research with college professors or taking trips to learn as much as we can about a particular subject matter.

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.

I like that it's challenging - that when I'm writing, I feel as if I'm pouring everything I have into the story until there's nothing left and I have to begin thinking about a new world and set of circumstances to research and explore.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.

I start each of my scripts by going on a journey of painstaking research and discovery, much as I do a piece of long-lead journalism.

I have the foundation to write, and then I go back and do research, and some of that might influence the recrafting of certain scenes.

I don't think in genres. Once I get a germ of an idea I wait for it to die! And if it refuses to die and keeps coming back, I start thinking more about it. Then come the world and the characters. I wait to get bored and if I don't get bored- then I start building on them.

It's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing.

In documentaries, the process is that you film a lot of things, and out of what you've shot, something organically reveals itself, and there's a discovery process.

For me, the easiest thing to figure out is the story I want to tell, and the hardest thing is to figure out the voice that's gonna tell it. And that's why I finish very little.

It's a challenge for any writer to write beyond what he knows. You get material, adapt it, and do the best you can with it.

I'm not necessarily scanning for clues when I make documentaries.

I do better just letting the stories develop. I don't outline very well, and I can't follow it if I do. Once I've outlined it, why write the damn book?

I really want to write another novel, and I am trying to come up with what the story will be. As I learned with 'Groundswell,' I can't force it; I just have to wait for it to come to me.

So we [with Kate DiCamillo] decided to give the friends an object and see what they did with it. The object was a sock and it went from there. Once we got going, once we got on a roll, it became very easy to work together and to figure out how to do it. We would meet for two-hour segments, usually from 10-12, two or three times a week. We met all one summer, and I think into the fall.

A library is many things. It's a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It's a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books---the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the atlases. If you like to be told a story, the library is the place to go.

You know, because you outline a movie, it kinda comes at the same time. I mean, there are days when you are just concentrating on 'ok, let's worry about just comedy today,' and there are days when you're like 'you know what, we gotta just beef up the story.'. But, it's not like process wise it's that technically separate. One informs the other, so they kinda all happen together ideally.

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't-I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere-but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

I think that sharpens the intention of a scene and clarifies a story's arc. Of course, I don't seek the questions until after I've written a scene - or maybe after I've daydreamed it.

Most of my stuff is just a series of false leads. I'll approach a story as a subject and then make a whole bunch of different runs at the lead. They're all good writing but they don't connect. So I end up having to string leads together.