Deborah Raney Quotes

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

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.

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?'

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

I feel like I know how to write plot.

When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.

My stories often begin with a situation or character rather than an insight about the human condition. It's always been difficult for me to write from an abstract idea, no matter how interesting or compelling I feel the idea might be.

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

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

'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.

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.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

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.

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

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.

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.