Chris Wooding Quotes

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

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.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

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.

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.

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

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

It's nice to know when you're a part of a story, it's nice to know at least something about the beginning, middle, and end.

I tend to write my beginnings and endings first - as a cartoonist and storyteller, I couldn't sit down every day if I didn't know where the story was headed.

What I do is put my characters into situations that are so precarious there is no way to get out. And then I figure how to get them out.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

What comes to me always is a character, a scene, a moment. That's going to be the beginning. Then, as I write, I begin to perceive an ending. I begin to see a destination, although sometimes that changes. And then, of course, there's the whole middle section looming.

The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

The great thing about a trilogy is that it feels like you've got a beginning, a middle, and an end.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.